


The Time of the Season

by WhenasInSilks



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel, Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Armor Kink, Community: cap_ironman, Dramatic Irony Kink, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending, Identity Porn, Identity Porn with Porn, Kink Meme, M/M, Masturbation, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Oral Sex, Pining, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Sexual Fantasy, just a whole lot of sex in general, partial repost, two-person love triangle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2019-07-03 00:59:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 53,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15808098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: Iron Man shuffles his feet and clears his throat in a burst of static. “If you ever need to talk, I’m here. Doesn’t matter the reason.”For one wild moment Steve actually considers it. Surely if he can tell anyone, it’s Iron Man? Iron Man would never shrink away, would never laugh at him.But what could he possibly say?Actually, Shellhead, I just pulled myself off three times in the past hour and I was thinking about your boss the entire time.Actually, Shellhead, I’m a science experiment they let out of the lab too soon and I think I might be going out of my mind.





	1. it's the time of the season

**Author's Note:**

> Transferring this serial over from the [kink meme](https://cap-ironman.dreamwidth.org/1847742.html?thread=13800638#cmt13800638) because it’s getting seriously unwieldy. To those who’ve been following along over there, I’m currently reposting (edited) older content (updates Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays). New material will start at Chapter 9, at which point the update schedule is anyone’s guess. 
> 
> Haven’t decided whether I’m going to stick to the kink meme pattern for the new stuff (content posted as I write it, in 2-4k chunks, with minimal editing) or whether I’ll try for proper chapters. It depends on which proves less stressful—this one really is just for fun, guys. 
> 
> Thanks to OP for their wonderful prompt (sorry it’s taking so long to fill); to the 616 SteveTony Discord for support, encouragement, and general enabling; and to every single person who commented on the kink meme for being actually just the best. I have no idea who most of you are, but this lessens my love for you not one jot, for it is as the flame that burns eternal (in a totally non-creepy way), &cetera &cetera.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covering kink meme chapters 1-4

It’s not exactly a surprise when the cycle comes back.

Well. ‘Comes back’ isn’t quite right, considering that implies that the cycles ever left off, and sure, seven months is definitely the longest since the serum Steve’s gone without one of his… ‘funny spells,’ as he’s taken to thinking of them, but they’ve never been the most regular things in the world. So all told, it’s not exactly a surprise when he feels that first flush of heat, that sudden prickle of interest low in his belly.

Given the choice, though, he’d really have preferred different circumstances.

Circumstances, say, that don’t involve an impromptu, post-Avengers-finance-meeting brunch, and most of the team gathered around the kitchen table while Wasp teases Tony about a gala both of them attended the previous night.

Tony did, Steve recalls, invite him as well. 

_“It’ll be a bore, really,” he said, voice apologetic, eyes twinkling. “Just a bunch of old fuddy-duddies there to see and be seen.”_

_Steve quirked an eyebrow. “You should’ve been a salesman.”_

_“Instead of a greasy engineer, you mean?” Tony asks, holding up oil-blackened hands in illustration. “Well, the world’s loss is your gain, or at least it will be when I finish that shield redesign. Seriously though, it might be a little dull, but it’s for a good cause and the food’s tremendous and the company isn’t entirely deplorable.”_

_“Careful where you swing that ego of yours, Stark,” Steve said, dryly. “You might put someone’s eye out.”_

_Tony let out a shout of delighted laughter. He always laughed like that with Steve, as if he couldn’t quite believe his ears. It had bothered Steve at first—did Stark assume people didn’t joke back in the forties, or was he just too taken by the stars and stripes to remember the man inside the suit? But over the course of these past few months, Steve gradually came to realize that Tony Stark, for all his wealth, wit, intelligence, and charm, simply wasn’t a man who expected happiness. It always took him by surprise. Since then, Steve always tried to joke with Tony as much as possible. It warmed him, to know that he could give Tony something, when Tony had already given him so much._

_“You know, most of the time when people say that to me, they’re not talking about my ego,” Tony said with a grin and a lewd wink. “But no, for once I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about Wasp. She said she’ll be making an appearance.”_

_“You mean as…?” Steve waggled his fingers in a way suggestive of tiny wings._

_Tony’s grin broadened. “I don’t imagine so, although that would liven things up, wouldn’t it? No, in her civvies. Well, if by ‘civvies’ you mean ‘digs that give Vera Wang a run for her money.’ Wasp’s a high society girl, just like me. Old money, you know.”_

_“You shouldn’t—” Steve said. “Her secret identity—”_

_“Is more like an open secret?” Tony finished. “I mean, she doesn’t even wear a mask. I can ask her if she minds, but I’m telling you now she won’t. C’mon, Cap, think of the children.”_

_Steve frowned. “I thought you said the gala was for open space preservation.”_

_“The baby squirrels!” Tony improvised glibly. “Or, better yet, the poor, benighted industrialists, doomed to an evening of tedious company and mediocre canapes.”_

_“ And you said the food was ‘tremendous,’” Steve reminded him._

_“It will be! Terrific! Awe-inspiring! Very extremely… very.”_

_Steve smiled. “Thanks for the invite, Tony, but I think I’ll pass. It—”_ Doesn’t really sound like the sort of place I’d belong, _he didn’t say. “—doesn’t really sound like my scene.”_

_Tony straightened, suddenly serious. “If it’s not your scene, it’s not your scene, but if you’re thinking— I mean, even apart from the whole ‘Captain America’ thing, you’re my friend. Anywhere I belong, you belong, got it?”_

_This was almost certainly untrue, but it didn’t mean Steve didn’t appreciate hearing it._

_“Maybe next time,” he said, and at the time, he even meant it_.

Anyway, to hear Wasp tell it, Tony didn’t have much trouble consoling himself for Steve’s absence—consoled himself, by all reports, quite thoroughly with red hair and a hip-to-waist ratio that, if Steve takes Wasp’s gestures at face value, seems biologically unsound.

Steve takes the tingle in his gut as a sign it’s time for another helping of pancakes.

That’s his first mistake.

“I heard you didn’t leave alone either,” Wasp adds, waggling her eyebrows salaciously.

“I’m flattered,” Tony says. “I had no idea you were keeping such a close watch on my comings and goings.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Wasp says cheerfully, “but I got my information secondhand. I left early. You weren’t the only one with _things to do_ last night.”

Beside her, Giant Man chokes on a mouthful of coffee. Tony gives him a half-ironic salute with his own coffee mug, and slides Steve a triumphant glance when Giant Man blushes even further.

The tingle in Steve’s belly increases. He adds a few more strips of bacon to his plate and Tony’s conspiratorial glance gives way to one of reproach.

“ _So_ ,” Wasp presses, “how was the rest of your night?”

Tony’s face, which is still currently making sad-puppy “why are you eating all the bacon” eyes at Steve, undergoes an interesting transformation. His gaze drops, then darts back to Steve, lightning fast, a flush blooming slowly in his cheeks. His teeth drag over his bottom lip, color flooding in their wake.

Then he sits up straight and puts back his shoulders, features settling into a smile like something out of a toothpaste ad. “Oh, you know,” he says. “A gentleman never tells.” And winks.

At _Steve_.

Steve sucks in a breath as his cock gives a definite twitch.

He shoves back from the table, his chair scraping deafeningly across the floor.

“Sorry,” he says, wincing. “I just remembered, I’ve got to… go…” He scrambles for a plausible excuse. “Talk to Iron Man.”

Wasp and Tony are both looking at him, eyes wide and startled.

“Sure,” Tony says, slowly. “You want me to call him for you?”

“N-no,” Steve says. “No, that’s all right, I’ll just…”

Tony’s brows knit, his tongue darting out as his lips part in question, and Steve turns on his heel and flees before the situation can get even further out of hand.

Wasp's voice echoes plaintively down the corridor behind him.

"Was it something I said?"

Luckily, Steve is out of earshot before he can hear Tony's reply.

* * *

The thing is, he’s never had much experience in _dealing_ with desire. Not in the normal way of things. He was sickly as a child and then a teenager—the spirit more than willing, but the body so terribly weak. And then, after the serum, his body was in top working condition, but the desire was just… not there. He can’t say it ever bothered him much. There was a war to fight. He had more important things to think of.

Except then, four months out, he was out in the field and one of the guys was passing around a battered postcard of Betty Grable and the desire just slammed into him, a bolt from the blue, and it _hasn’t left_. It was as if his body had been storing up every wayward impulse, every flicker of sexual interest, only for the floodgates to open all at once until Steve was all but drowning in it.

So he took care of it, the way soldiers took care of such things, discreetly, whenever he could. It was difficult, the constant, unceasing simmer of lust, rising to a boil at little more than a glance, or a thought, or a smile. It was difficult, and a little bit maddening, but he was already pretty well accustomed to dealing with the hunger and the exhaustion and the discomfort and the fear, and it wasn’t the worst thing, he thought, watching the brightness fade from the young soldiers’ eyes as they marched past the burnt-out husks of farmhouses through churned up fields of mud and blood, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to have to deal with. At least it reminded him he was alive.

The first spell lasted two weeks before it vanished as suddenly as it came. Then, three months later, it was back again, and so it went, the desire coming on him every couple of months almost without warning. It never lasted longer than a few weeks, and often for much less. Steve grew pretty well-acquainted with his right hand, and learned to make the most of his leave on the rare occasions it aligned with his wayward biology.

Fortunately, the serum gave him a few advantages where wooing was concerned. Apparently it didn’t matter if you were awkward with the ladies when you were engineered to the pinnacle of human perfection.

So, all in all, while he’s not exactly thrilled by the return of his prodigal libido, it’s nothing he doesn’t know how to deal with.

That’s what he thinks at first, anyway. Experience very shortly proves him wrong.

The thing is, these _urges_ of his, they’ve never really been what you might call… particular. Gender has never been a factor, for one thing. Good looking guys, good looking gals, it’s all pretty much the same when the need is upon him. If he chose to pass time exclusively with the dames, that was mostly a matter of convenience. He isn’t sure what the army would have done if they found out Captain America was a queer, and an occasional sex maniac at that, but he never thought it worth the trouble of finding out. Not when there were other options available.

But even when it came to crushes—and Steve has had more than his share of those; it’s not impossible to like and admire someone without wanting to nail them to the wall, whatever some of the guys back in the mess hall might have thought—Steve’s impulses were pretty much indifferent. It was as if liking someone and wanting them were two completely different mechanisms. He held a torch for Peggy for years, but when his time came, she featured no more frequently in his fantasies than Jane Russell or Clark Gable or Gabe Jones of the Howling Commandos, and rather less frequently than the young woman he knew only as “Martine,” with whom he passed a few electrifying nights in Marseilles.

The urges are fickle in their object, that’s the main point. Infinitely distractible. They don’t… fixate. They’ve _never_ fixated.

Until now.

Until _Tony_.

The first time he comes with Tony’s name on his lips is excusable. He tries, generally speaking, not to fantasize too much about people he knows personally—it’s always seemed somehow like a violation. But it was, after all, Tony who was the unwitting trigger, and the need always comes on him so fast when it first comes, and so it was really only natural, by the time he reached his room, achingly hard, almost trembling with desire, that his few scattered thoughts before he came, shatteringly, over his hand and stomach, were all of Tony.

Tony, with his movie-star good looks and those ravines he has in place of cheeks, Tony with the charm in his smile and the warmth in his manner, with those clever hands and cleverer wit and the shadow in his eyes hinting that there was so much more to him than he ever let anyone see.

And it’s fine, isn’t it, because Steve’s post-serum physiology has more than its fair share of quirks, and anyway this is _Tony Stark_ he’s talking about—if you look up ‘desirable’ in the dictionary it’s accompanied with a photo of Tony’s face—and so it doesn’t mean anything. Not really.

Why should it?

It’s never meant anything before.

That’s what he tells himself in the wake of his first round, except that thinking about how it didn’t mean anything to jack off to Tony means he’s thinking about _Tony_ and he starts to get hard again. Steve has an eidetic memory, and he knows for a fact that he’s never been ready to go again this quickly, even at the beginning of the cycle. But then, he’s never gone this long between cycles before. Seems his body has a bit more than usual to make up for.

Luckily, he’s living in the future now, and the internet, he has been reliably informed, is for porn.

 _“It’s glorious,” Tony assured him, “an all-you-can-wank buffet,” and laughed delightedly at the flush on Steve’s cheeks before changing the subject, because Tony was kinder than he’d ever readily admit and_ good god, but Steve has got to stop thinking about Tony.

He cleans off his hands and reaches for his tablet. The video he opens is one he’s seen before. He was curious about the twenty-first century’s idea of a blue movie and spent a few instructive hours scrolling through sites with a surplus of Xs in the title. He’s never been a particularly good judge of what he’ll find arousing when the impulse returns, but he bookmarked this particular video anyway. There was something natural about it he failed to find in most of the others he’s seen. The two women featured seemed like they actually liked each other, like they were comfortable and having a good time. The blonde reminded him a little of Peggy. Not Peggy as he knew her, lean and toughened by war, but Peggy as she might have been in happier times. Less wary. Softer at the edges.

On screen the women are kissing, hands moving over one another’s bodies both eager and a little hesitant, as if they’ve only just discovered touch. Steve starts to touch himself, one hand trailing casually across his chest and stomach, the other wrapped around his length, moving in long, easy strokes, and it’s… good, isn’t it, it feels really good, as his ears fill with soft, slightly tinny moans, to be here, to be touching himself like this, to be able to take his time, and yet…

It’s not enough.

Not enough for the simmer in his blood, for the heat and tingling pressure mounting in his limbs, for the pulse pounding in his throat.

 _Enough_ isn’t the soft press of bodies, isn’t languorous, open-mouthed kisses pressed along the throat. Enough has _teeth_. Enough would be…

_muscles corded with exertion and the stink of sweat, a callused hand just this side of rough against the sensitive skin of his balls, the teasing brush of a mustached lip along the shell of his ear, “So tell me, Cap, how are you liking the twenty-first century now?”_

He comes twice more in the space of an hour, both times, despite his best efforts to distract himself, with visions of Tony on his mind.

Steve might have the makings of a problem on his hands.

He screws his eyes shut, rubbing at his temples.

What’s the matter with him? He doesn’t want this—doesn’t want these fantasies coming into his head and mixing him up. Tony is his friend. It feels strange to think about him like this, and not in a good way. It feels intrusive. It feels _wrong_.

It’s just too bad his body doesn’t seem to agree.

* * *

Steve is lying on the bed in the wake of his third orgasm in the morning, spent but not quite sated. Still, at least his blood seems to have settled long enough for him to catch his breath. As it turns out, this is just as well.

The heavy clunk of armored boots in the hall announces Iron Man’s approach.

“Winghead? You in?”

“Just a moment!” Steve calls, hastily stowing the box of tissues. He stumbles to the bathroom, pulling up his pants as he goes, and thrusts his hands under the tap. There’s only time for a perfunctory rinse, but at least the scent of sex doesn’t sit quite so heavily on Steve’s nostrils now, and anyway, he’s pretty sure the armor includes a filtration system.

He hopes.

“Iron Man!” he says, pulling open the door. He rearranges his features into an approximation of the welcoming smile with which he would, under any other circumstance, greet his best friend in the modern age. “What can I do for you?”

If Iron Man notices anything out of the ordinary, he gives no sign that Steve can discern.

“Mr. Stark said you wanted to speak to me?”

It’s practically Pavlovian, the way just the mention of Tony’s name sends tiny flames licking through his belly. Inside the staunch, unyielding leather of his boots, his toes make a valiant effort to curl.

Steve swallows. He’s starting to entertain the possibility that something is seriously wrong.

“Everything all right?”

Steve starts, and realizes he hasn’t actually answered Iron Man’s question.

“Oh,” he says, “yeah. I just… had a couple of ideas about some new training exercises I wanted to run by you.”

It even has the virtue of being true, although ‘ideas’ might at this stage be a generous description.

“Can’t wait to put me through my paces, huh?” Iron Man raises a gleaming metal bicep, gazing at it in joking admiration. At least, from his tone, it’s plainly supposed to be a joke, but Steve knows Iron Man about as well as he knows any man living, and he knows how proud Iron Man is of his armor. In Iron Man’s place, Steve isn’t sure he wouldn’t resent it, to be so constantly caged. But then, in many ways, Iron Man is a better man than him.

“Now,” Iron Man is saying, “and not that I’m complaining, mind you, but wouldn’t, say, team training sessions be a better time to discuss new exercises? You know you don’t actually have to run anything by me, right? You’re a full Avenger, same as any of us. In fact, if this is a seniority thing, I’d say you have the advantage on me by a couple of decades, although if that’s the standard you’re using, Thor’s got us both beat to flinders.”

Steve shakes his head, feeling a surge of fondness even through the prickling heat that’s begun creeping over him once again. Iron Man has always gone so far out of his way to make sure Steve feels welcome. Some days, Steve’s not sure what he’d have done without him.

Survive, he supposes. He’s always been good at that.

“Some of it involved some new equipment,” he improvises. “We’d have to get it custom-made. I wanted to be sure it was worth it.”

“Sounds to me like Mr. Stark’s the one you should really be talking to. Or did you just miss me that much? You know you never need an excuse to see me.”

Steve tries to dredge up a suitable response to Iron Man’s teasing, but his mouth is dry as his imagination conjures Tony in his workshop, grease-marked and rumpled— _already half-undone,_ his traitor brain supplies—the way he would smile at the sight of Steve, just like he did when Steve saw him—was it two mornings ago? _“Captain! What can I do for you?”_ Then, the memory curdling in Steve’s own desire, his voice takes on a suggestive tone it surely never had in life: _“Anything you need, just say the word. Anything at all.”_

Steve rips his mind back to the present. If this conversation continues much longer his preoccupation is going to start to show. In an unambiguous and thoroughly incriminating fashion.

“Yeah,” he says, in response to whatever Iron Man has just asked him. “I mean, no. I mean— Sorry, Shellhead. Got my head in the clouds. Now’s not really a great time to talk. Maybe later?”

“Oh! Sure.” Iron Man’s eyes—what Steve can see of them through the mask, anyway—are wide and a little taken aback, but he continues gamely enough, “Just say the word and I’m yours.”

Steve forces a smile. “Thanks. You’re a real pal.”

“Aw, you know me,” Iron Man says. “Anything for a man in uniform.”

 _“Anything you need,”_ Tony whispers in his mind, _“anything at all…”_

Normally, Steve takes Iron Man’s flirting in the spirit it’s intended—a bit of light-hearted banter between friends, but now it grates against his over-sensitized nerves. He needs to end this conversation _now_ , before he reveals something he regrets.

“So that’s all you wanted?” Iron Man is saying. “To talk about training regimens?”

It’s a moment before Steve can force his mind to process the words.

“That’s all,” he manages. What is Iron Man driving at?

“I’m just asking because Mr. Stark…”

Steve’s fingers tighten on the door jam, causing the wood to groan ominously. Steve relaxes his grip, praying that Iron Man hadn’t noticed, and that whatever he has to say can be dealt with quickly.

“He mentioned you seemed a little… off. At breakfast. I just wanted to check in, see if everything’s okay.”

“Everything’s fine,” Steve says.

“Because I hope you know…” Iron Man shuffles his feet and clears his throat in a burst of static. “If you ever need to talk, I’m here. Doesn’t matter the reason.”

Despite the awkwardness, there’s such a warmth and total sincerity in Iron Man’s voice that it occurs to Steve for one wild moment that he could actually try it. Surely if he can tell anyone, it’s Iron Man? Iron Man would never shrink away, would never laugh at him. With him, maybe.

Steve could really use someone to laugh with.

But what could he possibly say?

_Actually, Shellhead, I just pulled myself off three times in the past hour and I was thinking about your boss the entire time._

_Actually, Shellhead, I’m a science experiment they let out of the lab too soon and I think I might be going out of my mind._

“Everything’s _fine_ ,” he repeats, too tersely.

He knows it’s too terse from the way Iron Man stiffens and ducks his head, the rims of the eye-slots in his mask casting the eyes beneath them into shadow.

Steve feels a brief pulse of guilt, followed an instant later by an even stronger pulse of… something else. He resists the urge to adjust his pants.

“But I appreciate the offer. Was that everything? Because I really ought to be getting back to—”

jerking himself raw over sordid fantasies of Iron Man’s employer

“—work.”

“Sure,” Iron Man says. The habitual cheer in his voice sounds a little forced. “Let me know when you’ve worked out the kinks.”

Steve blinks. Is he imagining things, or is that sweat beginning to bead along his brow?

“The…kinks?” he echoes, dumbly.

Now there’s a note of confusion in Iron Man’s voice. “In the training regimen?”

Kinks in the training regimen. _Not_ that kind of kinks. Not

_ropes and gags and olive skin, fingernails scratching hard enough to draw blood and worshipful kiss-reddened lips, Tony, Tony, Tony_

Steve wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. It comes away damp. “I’ll be sure to do that. I’ll, uh. Catch you later, then.”

He doesn’t wait for a response, just flashes another perfunctory smile and shuts the door in Iron Man’s face.

There’s a long pause, followed by the clunking retreat of boots down the hallway.

Steve sags against the door, feeling feverish. His pulse is throbbing in his veins. It’s not the only thing that’s throbbing.

He palms himself through the fabric of his trousers. It hurts, the way the zipper and rough cloth press and drag against his over-sensitized skin, and yet somehow it’s still not anywhere near enough. An involuntary moan escapes him. It’s all he can do to keep his lips from forming Tony’s name.

Just a few more days, he tells himself. It’s always worst at the beginning. Just another day or so of this relentless, overwhelming need, and then it’ll be at manageable levels again. He can apologize to Iron Man then. All he has to do is wait it out.

* * *

It doesn’t get better.

It gets worse.

After the first two days, the frequency of the urges does decrease a little, but the corresponding increase in intensity more than compensates. Steve can go hours at a time without feeling anything but a faint restlessness, and then suddenly, sometimes triggered by a thought or a word, sometimes by nothing at all that Steve can discern, the need will come on him, even stronger than the first time. It builds and breaks over him like a storm—electric, torrential—until his vision goes cloudy and grey and his mind drowns in thoughts of _Tony, Tony, Tony_ …

That part hasn’t changed in the least.

Steve thinks he could have borne the rest, if not for that.

He comes face to face with Tony only once since the beginning of his cycle, and then entirely by accident.

It's well past midnight on the third day. Steve has taken to seeking food at irregular hours to avoid potential embarrassment. He forgot that Tony also tends to keep odd hours when in the midst of a project. Then again, he’s been doing his best to think of Tony as little as possible, and when he does, inevitably, think of him, it’s not Tony’s sleeping habits he’s thinking of.

Tony’s already in the kitchen when Steve comes down. Steve comes to a halt in the doorway, transfixed by the sight. Tony is caught between the yellowish, half-dimmed illumination of the overhead lights and the harsher light of the open refrigerator. He looks almost unreal, the soft wave of his dark hair picked out in bronze at the back, shading at the front to a gleaming blue-white. Vivid and subtle. Light and dark.

 _Tony_.

A shudder sweeps over him. He realizes he’s gripping the doorjamb hard enough to leave imprints in the wood. With an enormous effort of will, he relaxes his fingers, forces his frozen limbs to unlock. He’s just about to make his retreat when Tony turns and smiles.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks with wry sympathy.

“I—” Steve’s voice is a croak. “I— No, I was—”

Tony cocks his head bemusedly.

Steve gives in. “Yeah,” he says. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Doesn’t dare to is more like it. Sleep brings dreams, and dreams mean even less control over his own mind than Steve has while awake.

To be perfectly honest, Steve’s not entirely sure he’s not dreaming now.

“Anything I can do?”

There’s a faint roaring in Steve’s ears.

“What?” he hears himself say, as in his mind, _Tony steps forward, setting the mug he’s carrying down on the countertop and laying one hand on Steve’s waist. The other comes up to pluck at the top button of Steve’s shirt as Tony gazes at Steve through half-lowered eyes. “Anything?”_

He blinks. Tony is still halfway across the kitchen, hip propped comfortably against the counter, one hand curled around a mug.

“For the insomnia,” Tony clarifies. “Anything to drink, or…?” He takes a sip from his mug. His mouth pulls to one side and he gives a little shudder as Steve watches in helpless fascination.

“What are you…?”

“This?” Tony lifts the mug in question. The gesture brings his forearm to the light. Steve sees smooth muscle downed in dark hair. His throat feels dry as bone. “Coffee. Irish. My muse is a restless type—she doesn’t exactly work to schedule. But I’m assuming you actually _want_ to sleep, so maybe something more like… I don’t know. Chamomile tea? That’s a thing people drink, isn’t it? Or hot milk punch? I haven’t had that since I was a kid. Doubt it’d make much of a difference to you what with the whole…” He gestures vaguely at Steve, indicating, Steve supposes, the super soldier serum. “But maybe, you know, you’d at least get the placebo effect?” He pulls a face. “I’m rambling.”

 _Yes_ , Steve thinks. _Stop talking. Leave. Leave before I can’t_.

He takes a step closer, drawn by a pull he can’t seem to deny.

“No,” he hears himself say. “What’s a placebo effect?”

Tony blinks at him for a moment, then ducks his head and smiles. “Jeez,” he says. “I keep forgetting… I guess the term’s a little after your time, isn’t it? The placebo effect is… sometimes if you tell people you’re giving them medicine, it still has an effect, even if you’re not. Like if you give someone a sugar pill and call it advil, maybe their headache still goes away. Funny thing is, it can still work even if you know about it.” He shakes his head. “Brains, right?”

Steve lets out a hoarse laugh. It’s better than the alternative, which would be sobbing. “Yeah,” he says.

Tony’s face twists in concern. “You okay, Cap? You sound a little…” He sets his mug down on the counter and takes a few steps closer—too close by far. Steve is still as a statue, hardly daring to breathe.

“You’ve cut yourself shaving,” Tony says, softly, eyebrows still knit. “I wouldn’t have thought that was possible, not with your reflexes. Here, and—”

He raises one hand as if to touch Steve’s face.

Steve jerks back, shoulders slamming against the wall with an awful, incriminating thud.

Tony is staring at him, color draining from his cheeks. His eyes are wide and stricken. “I—” he says. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t— I didn’t mean—”

Steve shakes his head. _It’s not you_ , he wants to say, but he can’t seem to get his throat to work. Anyway, it’s not true. Not really. It _is_ Tony. That’s the whole problem.

“I’ll just—” Tony swallows visibly. “I’ll just leave you alone, shall I?”

Steve manages a tiny nod. His chest is heaving with each agonizing breath.

Tony’s smile is awful, a great red gash carved across his face like a wound. He steps back and gestures expansively to the kitchen. “All yours,” he says.

He’s almost out the door before Steve’s managed to get his vocal chords to work.

“Sorry,” he croaks.

Tony pauses in the doorway, head turning to one side, not quite far enough to look directly at Steve. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,” he says, and there’s a weight of bitterness in his voice that Steve can’t even begin to understand.

Then he’s gone.

Steve stands there for a few long moments, helpless in the face of the hurt he has caused.

Tony’s mug is still steaming on the counter. Steve can see—the advantages of super-soldier vision—the faint wet gleam where Tony’s lips met the porcelain just minutes before. It would be so easy to fit his own over the mark, a secondhand kiss.

He shuts his eyes. His body is burning, his dick swollen and aching. Steve has never in his life _wanted_ more; has never wanted to want less.

He makes it almost a full hour before touching himself. He’s never been particularly given to self-loathing, but standing in the shower with the water pounding down from above—ice cold, not that it makes the slightest difference—and his hand glistening with his own stolen release, he thinks he comes pretty damn close.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Just two bros, neither of whom are secretly and/or unwittingly in love or lust with the other, having a conversation about sexuality and genetically modified biology. Everyone is super honest and no one hides anything because again, neither of these bros is secretly and/or unwittingly in love or lust with the other.


	2. when love runs high

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> repost of parts 5 & 6
> 
> also, 3x a week is too frequent for my brain, so I'll finish this week according the orig schedule (update tonight, plus update on Thursday), and then after that it's gonna be Sundays and Wednesdays until we hit the new material. just fyi
> 
> Eternal thanks to the lovely [Serinah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serinah/pseuds/Serinah) for betaing and moral support.

**One Week Later**

There are a lot of things Steve likes about the twenty first century. There are a lot of things he misses.

At the moment, for example, he is deep in the grip of a profound nostalgia for clocks.

 _Real_ clocks. Not those flashy numbers blinking on a cell phone screen. Ones that _tick_. The kind that hang on the wall of meeting rooms, say, marking out time in steady intervals, offering order and comfort when the seconds seem to stretch into minutes and the minutes into hours with scarcely an end in sight.

Normally he’s entirely for these post-battle debriefings. It’s not easy to coordinate a team of five highly-powered individuals, all of whom maintain separate lives, careers, and identities. Well, all except Steve, who has secrets enough as it is. The debriefs are valuable, if nothing else, for creating a sense of continuity and cohesion—for helping the Avengers seem less like a loose confederation of individuals and more like a unit, on and off the battlefield. Steve is a soldier. He knows the value of that.

Given Steve’s… _present condition_ , however—he’s currently… ‘stable’ might be one way to put it, but that could change at any moment, now that he no longer has the rush of adrenaline to distract him—he’s not really in a state to appreciate the long-term advantages of being trapped in a meeting with no end in sight.

It doesn’t help that he’s doing it in an incriminatingly tight costume.

It helps even less that said costume still bears the evidence of Steve’s embarrassingly lackluster performance in yesterday’s battle. He’d managed to clean off most of the adhesive, but as for the tear in his mail… He’d jerry-rigged a solution so you’d hardly notice the damage, not unless you were really looking, but if he wants more than a temporary fix he’ll have to talk to…

Steve jerks his mind away from the thought.

It won’t be happening anytime soon, is the point.

And it helps least of all that it’s Giant-Man’s turn to chair the meeting, and he seems perfectly content to allow Thor to rehash every minute detail of the battle at top volume and in the grand heroic style. All the more time for Giant-Man to make eyes at Wasp, Steve thinks sourly.

He glances across the table, and is a little glad to see he’s apparently not the only one who finds the meeting unbearable. It had been hard, at first, for him to read Iron Man—between the all-concealing armor and the voice modulator, there weren’t many signals left to follow. But as he’d gotten to know the man better, he’d learned to pick up on the little signs that indicated his mood—the little movements, the subtle shifts of tone or position. Iron Man is open as a book, to someone who knows how to read him.

Right now, Steve reads tension in Iron Man’s clasped hands, his upright posture, the subtle tilt of his head. By the looks of it, Iron Man is almost as eager for this meeting to be over as Steve is himself.

The helmeted head turns, fractionally, his way, and Steve realizes he’s been caught staring. He looks hastily away, staring down at the table. Soon. Soon this will all be over and he can apologize to Iron Man, to T—

God _dammit_ . Don’t think about it, don’t _think_ —

He flexes his thigh muscles, then the ones in his calf, and then his toes, down the left side and back up the right. It does nothing to dispel the tension growing in his body. If anything, simply paying attention to that tension makes it all that much harder to bear.

He glances back over at Iron Man, who has turned towards Thor in what would probably seem to anyone else to be total attention.

Steve’s shoulders give an involuntary twitch. With a grimace that he hopes very much isn’t visible on his face, he turns back to his voluble comrade, just in time to hear him boom:

“—smote him greatly with a piece of the building the villain had himself shattered. Thus was the foe made victim of his own destruction, and thus was he, as all shall be who threaten the peace of this fair city, vanquished by the mighty Avengers!”

There is a moment of absolute silence.

Apparently displeased with this reaction, Thor smacks his hand down on the table in emphasis.

Giant-Man jumps, and clears his throat.

“Ah, um. Yes. Thank you, Thor. That was… commendably thorough.”

Across the table, Steve notices Iron Man shift slightly in his seat, the way he does when he’s trying not to laugh. Steve is feeling more than a little squirmy himself, although for entirely different reasons.

“Well,” Giant-Man says, glancing around the table. “If that’s everything…” His voice trails away in invitation.

“I can’t think of anything,” says Wasp.

“Yeah, I’ve got nothing,” says Iron Man.

Steve just hitches up one of his shoulders in a shrug.

“In that case…” There’s an air of slight confusion in Giant-Man’s voice, as if he can hardly believe the words coming out of his own mouth. “The meeting is adjourned.”

Wasp leaps to her feet.

It’s all Steve can do not to emulate her.

“Great!” she exclaims. “Not that this hasn’t been a blast, but…”

“Indeed,” Thor says solemnly, and with what Steve, is his current state, finds to be almost maddening hypocrisy. “I am certain we all have things we must attend to. Fare thee well, comrades.”

Steve stands slowly, giving the others ample time to reach the door. He’s just begun to follow when a gauntleted hand descends on his shoulder.

Steve comes to a halt, jaw clenching. He resists the urge to knock the hand away.

“Hey,” Iron Man says. “Can we talk for a moment?”

“Is it urgent?” Steve asks, voice brusque.

“I’m beginning to think it might be.”

He casts a longing glance towards the exit. Thor is already gone. Giant-Man and the Wasp are deep in conversation. As Steve watches, Giant-Man pulls open the door. Wasp’s smile lights up her face like the Rockefeller Centre Christmas tree. She pats him on the cheek and sashays through the doorway, Giant-Man at her heels. The door closes with an audible click.

Iron Man’s hand is still a heavy weight on Steve’s shoulder, fixing him in place. He gives it a pointed look. Iron Man holds his ground.

“Fine,” Steve says, sounding about as ungracious as he feels. “If it really is a moment.”

He walks back over to the table, sitting down in his recently abandoned chair. The seat is still warm, which is nearly enough to make him want to break something, but if the worst happens, it’s better that he have whatever small concealment the table can provide.

Iron Man doesn’t sit, not at first. He stares down at Steve for long enough to make Steve uncomfortable, before turning and walking a few paces away. He stops, then pivots abruptly, hand coming to rest on the back of Thor’s vacated seat.

“What’s going on?” he demands.

Steve stiffens.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

Iron Man shakes his head in sharp negation. “You’ve been holed up in your room all week, snapping the nose off of anyone who comes near you. You canceled an appointment with Mr. Stark—”

Steve can’t help it—he flinches, bodily. Images begin to rise in his mind— _dark hair, tanned skin, wicked grin, kind eyes_ , _stop stop stop stop_

“—barely said a word all meeting, and all this on top of yesterday’s fight—”

 _That’s_ enough to drag Steve back to reality. His hands on his lap tighten abruptly into fists.

“We _won_ yesterday’s fight,” he says, fighting to keep his voice under control.

“In the end.”

Steve can feel himself flushing, angry heat creeping up the back of his neck.

“Captain America’s not allowed to have off days? Is that it?”

“Not ones like that. Not on top of everything else.”

“At least I answered the call!” Steve snaps. “At least I showed up.”

Iron Man gives a little jerk. It wasn’t so many months before that he’d been called in for a special disciplinary meeting after failing to answer a call to assemble. Evidently the memory still stings.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you did. You showed up and you almost got taken down by Paste-Pot Pete. _Paste-Pot Pete_ , Cap. He gave _himself_ that name. His superpower is a tricked-out glue gun.”

“He got the drop on me,” Steve growls.

“Because you failed to secure the perimeter. You’ve _never_ done that before, not in all the time I’ve known you. We all have off days, but you don’t have to be a genius to spot the pattern here. Something’s up.”

“And if I said it was personal?” Steve flings Iron Man’s own excuse back at him.

Iron Man goes still. After a moment he says in a quieter tone, “When it got personal with me, you and the rest of the team voted to remove me from active duty.”

Steve goes cold.

“You think I should be suspended.” His voice sounds thin to his own ears.

Iron Man sighs. “No,” he says, more gently. “No, of course not. You’ve pulled my ass out of the fire more times than I can count. We’re not going to bench you for a single mistake. But—and I’m speaking from first-hand experience here—” He takes an audible breath, fingers tightening and then loosening on the back of Thor’s empty chair. “Personal problems stop being personal right at the point where they start affecting the team. That’s when you have to choose.”

 _Choose_.

The word drops like a stone into the hollow pit of Steve’s stomach.

Choose. Between what? The Avengers had given him friends, a home, a _life…_ And now he might lose that, all due to an out-of-control side-effect of the very procedure that had let him earn his place here in the first place. That wasn’t a choice. It might be a joke, if Steve could bring himself to laugh about it.

Iron Man sighs again and takes a seat. He angles himself towards Steve, leaving plenty of space between them, but the message is clear. _If you need me…_

“Do you remember what you said to me before I was suspended?” he asks.

Steve nods dully.

“Well,” Iron Man says. “I don’t want to pry, but if there’s anything I can do, anything at all—”

“There isn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

 _Yes_ , Steve thinks, and then, _no._

“Because I’m just saying, I may not be a genius myself, but I’ve got one on speed-dial, and I’m sure he—”

_“No!”_

Iron Man startles backwards as Steve surges forward, almost throwing himself bodily onto the table. If Iron Man had been wearing anything other than a suit of armor, Steve might have picked him up and shaken him.

“You can’t tell. You can’t tell—” He doesn’t say the name, doesn’t even allow himself to think it. “— _anyone_. Not anyone at all, do you understand?”

“Winghead, what the _hell_ —”

“You have to promise me,” Steve grinds out. “ _Promise me_ not to tell.”

There’s a brief silence, punctuated only by Steve’s own heaving breaths.

“If I promise,” Iron Man says, carefully, “will you tell me what’s going on? Will you let me help, if I can?”

He leans across the table. Steve knows he must look half crazed, but Iron Man doesn’t seem to care, just slides a gauntleted hand across the tabletop so that it rests inches away from Steve’s own.

Steve is startled by how badly he _wants_ to tell. It’d never seriously occurred to him before, to confide his secret to someone else. Not before the onset of this terrible cycle.

(Not before Iron Man…)

“Promise me,” Steve says. Almost unbidden, his hand on the table scoots an inch or too closer to Iron Man’s.

Iron Man seems to sag forward. He brushes the fingers of his gauntlet over Steve’s own, a brief gesture of comfort and solidarity. “I promise,” he says.

Slowly, Steve sits back in his chair. Beneath the leather of his gloves, his fingers are tingling where Iron Man touched them. He shuts his eyes and passes the offending hand over his face.

“This room,” he says. “Is it secure?”

Iron Man sounds surprised at the question. “Of course!”

“Not—” Steve grimaces. “Not like that. I mean from… You know.”

From our friends and teammates. From your boss. From everyone we’re supposed to trust.

He half expects Iron Man to balk, but instead, he hears the scrape of a chair followed by receding footsteps. Something on the other side of the room beeps and whirs.

“All done,” Iron Man announces as more clunking footsteps announce his return. “All recording devices have been disabled, and I’ve put the room on lockdown, just to be sure. We can leave at any time, but no one can enter unless we let them.”

He pauses behind Steve’s chair. Steve tenses, half-expecting Iron Man to reach out and touch him again, but Iron Man only says, in a voice that somehow manages to be reassuring even when flattened and twisted by the voice modulator, “Safe as houses, Cap,” and moves on to his own seat.

Steve nods and tilts back his head, opening his eyes to stare up at the ceiling. He takes a steadying breath.

“It’s—” he says, and licks dry lips. “It’s the serum.”

The sound of sudden movement from Iron Man’s direction brings Steve’s head jolting down to stare at him.

Iron Man is sitting bolt upright, palms flat on the table. “Are you all right?” It’s hard to tell through the vocal distortion, but Steve thinks he sounds a little hoarse. “It’s not— It’s still working, right?”

Steve can’t help but let out a short laugh at that. “No, no, the serum is working fine. Everything is… normal.” Give or take a few pesky details, but don’t _think of that don’t think_ — “That’s the problem.”

He stares down into his lap, kneading the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other. Iron Man says nothing, only waits for Steve to continue.

Steve wonders if it’s gratitude or resentment he’s feeling.

“Ever since the serum, I haven’t felt much in the way of physical… urges. I see a good-looking dame—sorry, woman—on the street or the television and I can admire her, but I don’t feel…” He pulls a face, gesturing vaguely at the part of himself which is mercifully concealed by the table. “There’s just… nothing there. No interest.”

He chances a glance over at Iron Man. Iron Man’s posture is attentive, but otherwise inscrutable. Steve looks away again.

He takes another breath. “That’s what it’s like most of the time. But every three or four months… The feelings come back. All of them. More than is, uh, usual. For most people. It can be a little overwhelming.”

Still no reaction from Iron Man.

“It lasts for a week or two, and then it’s gone,” Steve says. “The thing is, I hadn’t, uh. For a while. Not since the ice. Except then, last week… I think the delay might have affected things a little, because it’s been… stronger. This time. Than it is usually.”

_Than it’s ever been before._

“And it’s been a little distracting. Even when I’m not actually, you know…”

_Out of my head with lust._

“…it’s still there, in the background. So that’s why I’ve been… on edge.”

“On edge,” Iron Man repeats slowly.

Steve looks over in time to see Iron Man lift an arm and rub the back of his neck. It’s an odd gesture—surely he can’t feel anything through the suit?

“So,” Iron Man says, still slowly, as if trying the words out, “you’re saying that the reason you’ve been so distracted lately is that you’re… in heat.”

Steve sits bolt upright, fingers balling into fists.

“I’m not a cat,” he snaps.

“No,” Iron Man agrees, “no, of course not. You’re much more of a dog-type. One of those big wolfy-looking ones with the bright eyes and the noble bearing.”

The legs of the chair screech across the floor as Steve shoves away from the table. This. _This_ was why he’d never told—

“Aw, hell,” he hears Iron Man say from behind him. “Cap. Cap, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean to make fun, I’m just… processing.” He lets out a staticky laugh. “I mean, I’m a guy walking around in a custom-fitted tin can. One of my coworkers is an actual god, and I used to hang around with a modern-day Jekyll-and-Hyde. Only, you know. Greener. Who am I to judge?”

Steve nods stiffly, slightly mollified, but doesn’t turn around.

“So, uh,” Iron Man says after a moment. “Not heat, but some kind of—of mating cycle? For lack of a better term?”

“I don’t think—” Steve’s mouth pulls to one side. “I mean, if that were true, wouldn’t I only be interested in women?”

There’s an audible inhalation from behind him, but Iron Man doesn’t say anything.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Steve asks, evenly.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Iron Man says yes.

“What?” Iron Man sounds genuinely shocked. “No! God, no. How could you— And even if I was that much of an asshole, I hope I’m not that much of a hypocrite.”

Steve turns back around at that. “You…?”

Iron Man’s laugh is a little strained. “I guess this is just one big old coming out party.”

“I never…” Steve trails off. He’s hardly given any thought at all to what Iron Man is like inside—or, he supposes, _outside_ the suit.

“No, well. Most people don’t, what with the armor. Who spends time speculating about the sexuality of a bunch of nuts and bolts?”

Something about Iron Man’s inflection seems to catch and pull at Steve, like the scrape of a hangnail.

“You’re still a man under there,” he protests, feeling an odd pang of guilt.

It occurs to him to wonder if he’s sure Iron Man really _is_ a man. The name’s a clue, of course, and the Avengers all refer to Iron Man as “he” and Iron Man has never corrected them, but has he ever said anything to confirm the assumption?

Iron Man’s supposed to be his best friend, and Steve doesn’t even know Iron Man’s gender.

He’s always liked that about their friendship, the way all those little personal and biographical details never seemed important or even relevant. Steve has lost so much. He’s the only one of the Avengers without a secret identity, and that’s because, for all intents and purposes, Steve Rogers doesn’t exist in this era. That life was dead and buried over half a century ago.

So he’d appreciated that he and Iron Man were able to build such a rapport without ever removing the masks. As if it was okay to be nothing more than Cap and Iron Man; Winghead and Shellhead. As if that could be _enough_.

Now he just feels as if he’s been taking Iron Man for granted.

“Still a man,” Iron Man echoes. “Yeah.” The odd note fades from his voice as he leans back in his chair, looking a little more at ease. “Don’t beat yourself up about it, Cap.” Iron Man always did know how to read him. “Pledged not to pry, right? It’s good that you haven’t… I mean, it’s nice. That you still count me as a friend and never… God dammit.” There’s a crackle of static as Iron Man exhales noisily into the modulator.

“I’ve always thought so too,” Steve says, except…

Thing is, now he’s started trying to imagine Iron Man, it’s a little hard to stop.

How old would Iron Man be? Not too old, surely, to be able to go out into the field and take the kind of punishment Iron Man endures on a regular basis. Steve wonders if he’s handsome. There’s something about the way he holds himself sometimes, particularly in battle, that makes Steve think he might be—as if he’s used to commanding attention. But then, Iron Man can be so self-deprecating. Wouldn’t a handsome man be more confident? Unless something had happened to shake that confidence. Maybe there’s a reason other than a generous benefits package that Iron Man spends all his time in a metal suit. An injury, maybe. But surely an injured man wouldn’t have accepted such a dangerous position?

Iron Man is speaking.

“So,” he says, “that’s what’s been going on? In the field yesterday, too?”

Steve flushes at the memory. “I was careless,” he says, gruffly. “It won’t happen again.”

Iron Man tilts his head to one side. “You know it’s okay if you need to take a leave until this is over, right? I can vouch for you to the others if necessary, but I’m sure they’d—”

“No!”

He says it much too loudly. The word echoes around the closed chamber.

He takes in a breath.

“No,” he says again, more calmly. “It— It’s good for me. The fighting. It helps keep my mind off things. And it’s never been a problem before. During the war, I mean. Hitler didn’t exactly leave room for sick days.”

“If that’s what you think is best,” Iron Man says, sounding a little dubious.

“It is.” Steve puts every ounce of certainty he has into the words. Apparently this has some effect, because Iron Man’s voice is a little brighter when he next speaks.

“Okay. So it’s just a matter of… waiting it out then?”

“Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days. A week at absolute most.”

“Sure,” Iron Man says. “Sure. And you’re—you’re getting everything you, uh. Need?”

Steve blinks.

“Oh god. I’m sorry. That was such an awkward— Forget I asked. Really. I was just, you know. Concerned.”

“It’s fine,” Steve says, testing the words out and finding they’re true. “I… appreciate the concern, but I’m… managing.”

“Have you always, uh. Handled this on your own?”

Steve shrugs. “Sometimes, if I got lucky, my leave would come up at the right time, but for the most part. It’s under control. I’m used to taking care of myself.”

The silence following these words is weirdly long.

“…huh,” Iron Man says finally. “Well, that’s good. Right? In general, I mean. I thought it was going to be something much worse. Not to minimize… Just. It sounds like you’ve got things pretty well in hand. Oh. Hell. No pun intended.”

Steve can’t help himself. He starts to laugh. It feels like the first time he’s laughed in a very long time.

“Unless you think it’s funny,” Iron Man adds, “in which case pun absolutely intended.”

Steve covers his smile with one hand, attempting to smooth it from his face.

“I should go,” he says.

“Oh,” says Iron Man. “ _Oh_. Is it— Sorry, none of my business.”

“Not yet,” Steve says in answer to the uncompleted question. The smile still twitches at the corners of his mouth. “But soon, I think. Much better if I’m in my own rooms when it hits. Less awkward.”

Iron Man makes a nasal sound of agreement, something a little like “ _nggngh._ ”

Steve ducks his head and takes a breath. “I just wanted to say thank you. For—” He shakes his head. “You know I’ve never actually told anyone about this before? I mean, Erskine was dead, and it was such a…” He grimaces. “…a personal thing, and it’s not like anyone thought to ask, so. Thank you.”

Iron Man is very still.

“I’m honored by your trust,” he says. The words are strangely formal, but somehow seem all the truer for it.

“Who else would I trust, if not you?”

That, too, feels almost like a confession.

The sincerity seems to hang in the air, a moment of almost tangible connection.

Steve shifts on his feet, suddenly aware once more of the buzzing beneath his skin.

“I really do need to go.”

“Right,” Iron Man says. “Of course. Just one thing, before you go. Your mail.”

Steve blinks at him, surprised. He’d completely forgotten about the damage to his uniform.

“I just thought, since you canceled your appointment with Mr. Stark—”

The name drops into his belly like a glowing coal. Tony had wanted to fit him for an upgrade or some new piece of gadgetry, but of course, under the circumstances it had been impossible. The very idea of standing there and submitting himself to those quick, clever hands, measuring, tweaking, touching…

“-derstandable,” Iron Man is saying, “and I just thought, if you’re not, uh, comfortable, I could always take him the uniform. If you’d just leave it outside your suite or something, I can take it to him…”

“That’d be really great, Shellhead,” Steve forces out through dry lips. “Thanks.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” and again, there’s something just this side of _wrong_ about the note of cheer in Iron Man’s voice, but Steve doesn’t have time to think about that now, doesn’t have time for anything but—

He glances towards the exit. “I—”

“Go!” Iron Man flaps a gauntleted hand at him. “Go on. I promise I won’t hold it against you. Not unless you want me to.”

Steve just nods, utterly unequal to responding properly to the joking innuendo.

“Thanks,” he says again, and starts for the door.

He’s just about to put his hand on the handle when Iron Man speaks again.

“It you change your mind though…”

Steve freezes. There’s a strange feeling in his abdomen, as if his heart and stomach had suddenly flipped places.

Surely Iron Man can’t be offering what it sounds like he’s offering?

But then, would that really be so bad? Iron Man is his friend, after all—someone Steve can trust. He may not know much about the man beneath the mask, but he knows that much—knows too that whatever else he looks like, the man beneath the mask is tall, and has piercing blue eyes, which is… which is very…

“…reputable agencies,” Iron Man is saying. “Very discreet. I’m sure we could…”

Oh.

Iron Man isn’t offering his own companionship. He’s offering to help Steve acquire some.

Well.

It’s certainly nothing Steve hasn’t resorted to before, although things had felt a little different in times of war. He hadn’t thought Iron Man would be the sort, that’s all, to have ‘discreet’ and ‘reputable agencies’ on hand. A strange way of talking about it, too. Briskly pragmatic. Impersonal.

The thought hits him in a white-hot rush.

Maybe Iron Man’s familiarity with these agencies isn’t personal at all, not in _that_ way. Maybe he knew them for some other reason. Maybe this isn’t the first time he’d been called on to acquire a discreet companion for the evening. Of course he’d know which agencies were reputable. He’d have to vet them himself, wouldn’t he, as Tony Stark’s bodyguard, if Tony—

If he—

“Winghead? Are you all right?”

_Steve’s knuckles rapping against the door—_

_Tony’s voice issuing from within, a cheery caress as the door swings open:_

_“About time, darling! What kept you so lo— Oh.”_

_Tony’s mouth would fall open as Steve stepped close, crowding him, forcing Tony to look up to meet his gaze._

_“Not what you were expecting?” Steve would ask, and watch the movement of Tony’s throat as he swallowed, watch those eyes darken with desire, as_

_“Much, much better,” Tony would say, fingers rising to knot in Steve’s shirt as Steve’s hand found his waist, as—_

“I—” Steve rasps.

_—kissing Tony up against the wall as Tony gasps and tangles his fingers in Steve’s hair. Steve nudges Tony’s face aside, scraping his teeth along Tony’s jaw, whispering into the soft skin just below Tony’s ear—_

_“How do you want me?”_

_“How do I—” Tony’s voice breaks away as Steve’s hand cups his ass, lifting him up, pressing him close, molding his body to Steve’s own. Tony lets out a moan as Steve rocks his hips forward, breathing moist heat into Tony’s ear as he reminds him,_

_“You’re the one paying for the privilege.”_

“I have to go,” Steve says, yanking open the door, half-running, half-stumbling into the hall. He thinks maybe he hears Iron Man’s voice calling after him.

He doesn’t look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is narrated solely from Steve’s POV, but if you think Tony doesn’t immediately go and have a nice shame-wank to the memory of what Captain America looks like when he's just been sucker-punched by lust, allow me to correct that misconception.
> 
> next time: this story continues to earn its unofficial title, "Running With Boners," as Steve continues his trend of angstily popping chubs and then running away. also, there's like, plot development or w/e


	3. in this time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covering kink meme parts 7-9
> 
> thanks to Serinah for the beta

It’s two days later that everything goes to hell.

The villain intent on taking apart Times Square is new, or, at least, no one Steve or any of the other Avengers have ever heard of. He fights like it’s personal though, with a bevy of insults and no clear aim other than general mayhem.

“Fools!” the villain screeches from where he hovers fifteen feet above a brightly lit billboard. “Do you think to stand against me? All shall fall before the might of Rostro the Puppeteer!”

“Oh, brother,” Wasp mutters near Steve’s ear.

Rostro raises a gaudy-looking baton, gesturing wildly. “Arise, my legions!”

Dozens of figures in identically garish costumes begin to pour into the streets.

Iron Man groans. “Of course he has a clone army. It’s just that kind of day.”

The fight is challenging, but far from the most challenging they’ve faced. Rostro seems largely content to hurl insults from above, leaving his army to do most of the work. The clones possess inhuman strength and agility and a limited capacity for flight, but they don’t seem particularly intelligent.

“Seems like some sort of hive mind,” Giant Man observes. “If we were to take out the controller…”

Steve nods. “Thor?”

“’Twould be my privilege,” Thor intones, and launches into the air, only for half a dozen of the clones to fasten onto his cape and drag him inexorably earthwards. “Foul varlets! Unhand me, or you shall taste the wrath of the son of Odin!”

Overhead, Rostro screams with laughter. “None can stop me! Even the gods themselves must fall!”

“Anybody ever warn you about counting your chickens?” a metallic voice counters from somewhere out of Steve’s field of view.

“You think to best me? _You_? You’re nothing more than Tony Stark’s little wind-up toy!”

Iron Man laughs aloud, fierce and joyous, soaring past Steve in a rush of red and gold.

“Please!” he says. “Allow me to prove you wrong!”

The punch he delivers is a work of kinetic beauty. Steve can feel his mouth drop open at the sight of it, the smoothness and power, the way the light of the sun catches the armor and sets it to blazing. Rostro flies backwards through the air and Iron Man follows, like a fire-bird streaking flame across the sky.

 _Tony_ , Steve thinks. He can feel something catch alight within him, wonder kindling to desire like a flame to dry grass. _Tony made that_.

“Cap!” Wasp shrieks. “On your left!”

Steve starts to turn, but too late. Something slams into him in a burst of color and pain, before the world winks out like a light.

* * *

When he comes to, he’s lying flat on his back in the middle of 7th Avenue, Wasp and Giant Man looking down at him with expressions of concern. They’ve both returned to their natural sizes, so the battle must be over.

Steve isn’t sure whether this makes him feel better or worse.

“You all right?” Wasp asks.

Steve nods, sending a wave of pain and dizziness through his head. “I’ll do,” he says. “How long was I out?”

“Only a couple of minutes,” Wasp says.

“Rostro?”

“Iron Man took him out. Thor… helped.”

“It was something else,” Giant Man says, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen Iron Man fight like that before.”

Steve begins to push himself to his elbows.

“You probably shouldn’t move,” Giant Man tells him, glancing at Wasp. “Head injuries and all.”

Steve pulls himself into a sitting position with a grunt. “I’ve had worse,” he says.

He registers the whir of repulsors and displaced air as Iron Man comes to land in front of them.

“Cap!” he exclaims. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“Peachy,” Steve tells him, cheeks burning.

“Should you be sitting up?” Iron Man turns to the group at large. “Should he be sitting up?”

“Probably not,” Giant Man says. Steve shoots him a withering glare.

“I’ll be fine,” he says. “Help me up?”

He extends his hand.

Iron Man hesitates a moment before clasping it and pulling Steve upright. They stay linked like that for a moment, hand in gauntleted hand as Iron Man’s eyes flicker restlessly over Steve’s face and body.

“What happened to Rostro?” Steve asks, cutting off whatever question is no doubt forming.

“Thor’s taking him in,” Iron Man says, dropping Steve’s hand. His voice has gone suddenly hard and flat, clipped in a way Steve has never heard from him before. “He volunteered. I think he’s pretty sore about the thing with the cape. You’re sure you’re…?”

“I’ll be _fine_ ,” Steve repeats.

Wasp shakes her head. “What happened? One minute we were fighting and the next you were just standing there, staring up. It was like you were hypnotized or something.”

Steve clears a suddenly dry throat.

“I—”

Hypnotized wasn’t a bad word for it. He’d been captivated by the evidence of Tony’s brilliance, his resilience, his craftsman’s eye—captivated and overmastered by the feelings it had roused in him, the awe and the longing and the terrible, terrible hunger. He can feel it now, bubbling up once more inside him and the heat in his belly, the wanting and the _heat_ —

Iron Man is staring at him. Steve catches the minute tilt of his head as Iron Man glances down—

Steve looks down too, and realizes he’s already half-hard.

“I have to—” he rasps, and somehow it’s so much worse, to be there in public, with the eyes of the city—the eyes of his teammates, two pairs questioning, one pair widening in realization—upon him, all the scrutiny so much oil on the fire burning inside him as the longing climbs rapidly towards a fever-pitch, as a single name pulses through his veins like the beating of drums—

He takes a step backwards, then another.

“I have to go,” he says, and then he turns on his heel and runs. He hears someone call out from behind him, but he doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow his pace, only vaults over the crushed ruins of an abandoned taxi cab and disappears into the city beyond.

* * *

Steve makes it home, barely, and even that is through sheer force of will. He’s not sure what he’d do if someone caught sight of Captain America jerking off in an alley. The press would have a field day.

In the mansion, he barricades himself inside the bathroom in his suite. There’s a half-formed notion in his head of getting in the shower, but the heel of his hand brushes against his cock as he’s opening his pants and the sensation is so overwhelming that he sinks to his knees. All it takes is a few strokes to send him off.

When he comes back to himself, he’s sitting on the floor with the back against the door, come cooling on his hand and stomach and the placket of his trousers. Steve gives a little hitching noise, somewhere between a laugh and a sob and even he couldn’t say which it was closer to. He reaches over and grabs some toilet paper, cleaning himself up as best as he can without actually getting up, then lets his head tip back, shutting his eyes and listening to the pounding of his pulse.

It isn’t long before the pounding is joined by a rapid counterpoint, faint but getting louder. Steve lets his head loll onto his shoulder.

 _Please_ , he thinks, unsure to whom or what he’s praying. _Please, don’t. Just leave me alone._

Someone is knocking on his bedroom door, sharp and urgent.

“Cap? Winghead, you there?”

 _Go away,_ Steve pleads in his mind.

More knocking, followed by the sound of the doorknob turning. Oh god. Surely Steve hasn’t forgotten to lock the door?

“The door’s unlocked,” Iron Man calls. “I’m coming in, okay?”

A few seconds of silence while Steve fights down a hysterical laugh, then the sound of the door opening and heavy boots approaching.

“Cap?” Iron Man calls, voice clearer now and much closer. “Are you there? I just— I just want to be sure you’re okay.”

_Go away. Please, please, go away._

Iron Man’s voice is softer now, as if thinking out loud to himself. “But where else could he—?” And then, with a throb of worry: “Oh god, I didn’t lose him on the way?”

God _damn_ it.

Steve bangs his head softly against the door. “I’m here,” he says. His voice is hoarse.

“Cap?” Iron Man says. “Oh, thank god. I thought— Are you all right?”

Steve opens his mouth to give some appropriately sarcastic reply—“Never better,” or something like that, but the words never leave his throat. Instead, he makes a small, choked sound humiliatingly like a whimper.

“Oh, hell,” Iron Man says. “That doesn’t sound… I’m going to call Don, okay? Just hang in there, Winghead, it’ll—”

“N-no doctor,” Steve forces out.

A brief pause. Then: “Are you sure?” Iron Man asks, uncertainly. “That was a pretty nasty hit you took, serum or no.”

Is Iron Man going to make him spell it out?

“Th-that’s not the problem.”

Iron Man lets out a staticky breath. “This is to do with— with what you were telling me about.”

Steve lets the silence speak for him.

Iron Man breathes out a curse, then, raising his voice, he says, “I’m going to go shut the door. I’ll be back in a moment. Don’t run out on me, okay?”

Steve turns his head into his shoulder again. “Where would I go?” he mumbles.

The words come out largely unintelligible, but apparently Iron Man understands them well enough, because he huffs out a laugh.

“Excellent point,” he says.

Steve hears boots retreating, the click of the lock, and then boots approaching again. There’s a series of faint mechanical sounds. When Iron Man speaks, his voice is right around the level of Steve’s ear, and Steve realizes he must have crouched down to Steve’s level.

“Okay,” Iron Man says. “So, I’m going to ask you a question, and I need you to answer me honestly.”

His voice is matter-of-fact, but pitched low and soothing. He sounds like he does when he’s reassuring a frightened civilian, and Steve hates how something in him responds to the tone.

“Cap?” Iron Man prompts.

Steve grimaces. “Just ask,” he says.

“What you told me, about your… condition never causing problems in the field before. Was that true? Because—” He breaks off for a moment, before resuming. “Because I’m going to be honest with you here, if you were lying about being fit for combat that’s… that’s a big deal, but if this is a new development… No one understands how the serum really works, and if the effects are changing after all this time, we need to have that looked at. We can find someone discreet. Hank Pym’s brilliant at that sort of thing, and I think he’s a friend of J— of Wasp’s. We could—”

“It’s not—” Steve gasps and Iron Man obligingly comes to a halt.

The light overhead is very bright. Steve squeezes his eyes shut.

“I wasn’t lying,” he says, because it’s important that Iron Man understand. “About it never having been an issue in the field. But it’s not— Not what you’re saying.”

After a moment, Iron Man says, gentle but firm, “You’re going to have to give me more than that, buddy.”

Steve _knows_ that, he knows, he wants to pound his head against the door and _scream_ with the humiliation of it, but he can’t, so he clenches his fists and takes a fortifying breath.

“I told you it was… worse. Than it’s ever been. But it’s also… It’s not usually picky. About who I find— I find a lot of people, uh. Appealing. Attractive. But this time it’s… It’s only one. And every time something reminds me…”

“That’s what happened today. Something happened to… remind you.”

Steve nods, then, remembering Iron Man can’t see him, forces out a terse, “Yes.”

“Is this… person you’ve been— Is it someone connected with the Avengers?”

Steve thinks there are some tortures that would be preferable to this. He’s trying so desperately hard not to so much as think the name, so hard not to picture

_hands, hips, shoulders, throat, blue eyes, blue eyes, blue_

but it’s as if his body is so primed that even the thought of a thought is enough to send a flush of warmth through his body, enough for interest to stir, low in his groin…

“Because, really, no one could blame you,” Iron Man says, gently teasing—plainly trying to put Steve at ease. “We’ve all seen Thor. Between those biceps and those flowing golden locks—”

“It’s not Thor.” Steve forces it out through clenched teeth. His fingers spasm, closing around empty air, and he’s trying _so damn hard_ to keep it together—

“Not Wasp or Giant Man? Because I’m pretty sure they’re toge—”

Steve smashes his fist down and feels the tiled floor shatter on impact. The fractured porcelain grates against his knuckles and he knows that when he withdraws his hand, he’ll find blood among the wreckage.

He lets his head slump forward.

“Cap? Are you—?”

“It’s Tony,” Steve says—mumbles it, really, into his chest.

Utter silence from outside the door. Then:

“What.”

Iron Man’s voice is flat, utterly without inflection. He might as easily be the robot Steve had first taken him for, in the submarine all those months before.

“It’s Tony,” Steve repeats, louder, and he thinks he might very well prefer to have his fingernails pulled up by their roots, but, “The person I’ve been— It’s Tony.”

His body is _definitely_ taking an interest now, but he forces himself to focus, to listen for Iron Man’s response.

“Tony _Stark_?” There’s definitely something in Iron Man’s voice now. It sounds a lot like disbelief.

Steve is starting to get angry. He knows he shouldn’t— Knows it’s _wrong_ to be thinking of Tony the way he has, but for god’s sake, he didn’t _choose_ this.

“No, I meant the _other_ billionaire philanthropist whose mansion we’re living in.”

Iron Man is almost spluttering now. “But he—he wasn’t at the battle, he—”

Steve can feel himself flushing. Surely, _surely_ he should be beyond embarrassment by now. “I know. But Rostro, he said— Called you ‘Tony Stark’s wind-up toy’ and I—”

“That’s all it took,” Iron Man says, and Steve isn’t sure from his tone whether it’s meant to be a question or not. He can’t say he much appreciates it either way.

Then Iron Man does the worst thing possible.

He starts to laugh.

The thought enters Steve’s mind with a brilliant burning clarity, that the human body simply isn’t designed to be able to handle this kind of humiliation.

He wishes, for the first time in months, that they’d left him in the ice.

“I’m sorry,” Iron Man says unsteadily. “I’m so sorry, I’m not laughing at you, I promise.”

“Sure sounds like it,” Steve says dully. He can’t even find it in himself to be angry.

“Jesus, _no_ !” Iron Man says, sounding genuinely distressed. “I would never— You’ve got to believe me, Cap, I would never, _never_ laugh at you. You do believe me, don’t you?”

There’s such earnestness in Iron Man’s voice that Steve can’t help but relax, if only a little.

“Sure,” he says, rubbing at the shame still burning in his cheeks. “Sure, I do.”

“It’s just—”

The words are cut short by another chuckle, and now that Steve is paying attention, he has to admit, it doesn’t _sound_ like Iron Man is laughing at him. Iron Man’s laughter is a little manic, sure, but also bright and warm in some indefinable way. If Steve didn’t know better, he’d say it sounded… _happy_.

“I can’t explain it, but believe me, you’d be laughing too if you— At least, I hope you would. It just, um. It occurs to me there’s a really simple solution to your problem. That’s all.”

Steve feels a stab of irritation. Here he is, most of the way hard and still covered in his own filth, and Iron Man’s talking about a _simple solution_? As if Steve wouldn’t have found one by now, if it existed—as if he wouldn’t have jumped on the chance—

Realization doesn’t so much hit as crash into him like an out-of-control automobile and for a moment the world goes white.

Then the images start.

_Tony kissing him, wet-mouthed and open, fumbling at the button of Steve’s pants—_

_Tony riding him, back arched, head thrown back in ecstasy—_

_Tony pounding into him, the slap of their bodies like some obscene music—_

“No,” Steve says, pressing his hands into his eyes. “No. No!”

_Tony naked, sprawled on Steve’s bed like an invitation to sin—_

With an enormous effort, he tears his mind away. He’s hard as a rock now. His palms have begun to sweat.

Iron Man is no longer laughing.

When he speaks again, his tone is light, but the lightness has a forced quality to it.

“Can I ask why not?”

Steve drags his palms from his eyes and down his cheeks. He can still— _God_ , he can still smell himself on his hands.

Why _not_?

An impossible question. How to choose, with so many answers before him?

He starts with the most obvious objection.

“He doesn’t— He isn’t— He’s a ladies’ man, he wouldn’t—”

Iron Man lets out a huff of laughter. It has no warmth in it. “I guess you don’t read the tabloids, huh? Let me assure you, Cap, Mr. Stark’s most definitely, uh. Equal opportunity, so to speak.”

The words lick hot trails down Steve’s spine. He shudders. That’s information he definitely could have gone without.

“It’s impossible,” he says.

“But why?”

Steve doesn’t answer.

“Listen, Winghead, I’m sure if you just told him—”

“Absolutely not.”

Iron Man’s laugh sounds strange to Steve’s ears. “I _really_ don’t think he’d mind. You know he has an entire collection of vintage Captain America memorabilia? Childhood crush doesn’t even begin to cover—”

Steve ducks his head against another flush of heat.

“Should you be telling me this?”

There’s a brief silence. “Probably not,” Iron Man says, still with that odd twist to his voice. “But my point is, I’m sure Mr. Stark would jump at the chance to, uh. Give you a hand.”

Steve shakes his head in frustration. Doesn’t Iron Man understand that that’s precisely why he can’t say _anything_ ? The fact that Tony was a fan as a kid isn’t exactly a surprise. Steve knows Tony admires him. What kind of a friend would he be—what kind of a _man_ —to take advantage of that admiration for his own physical gratification? And with so much at stake, would Tony even feel himself able to say no?

“If it’s the awkwardness factor,” Iron Man says, and his voice is so careful, “which is perfectly understandable, given the circumstances, I could always— I mean, I’d be happy to broach the subject with him if you—”

Steve sucks in a great gasp of air at the idea—the image of Iron Man approaching his boss like some kind of—of _procurer_. The thought is dizzying. He feels so crammed full of wanting it’s practically leaking through the pores of his skin. What would Tony say? Would he be embarrassed? horrified? intrigued?

“No,” he manages, “ _no_ , you promised.”

“Cap, you’re a _wreck_ .” Iron Man sounds half-wrecked himself. “You can’t keep going out in the field like this, you’re going to get yourself _killed_.”

Steve shakes his head, clutching at his hair. “You said you wouldn’t— You _promised_ , you—”

“I know.” Iron Man’s voice is much softer, and deliberately, almost painfully kind. “I know. I still mean it. I’m not going to tell anyone. Not if you don’t want me to.”

It takes a few moments for Steve to get his breathing back under control. “I know,” he says, finally. “I know you won’t. I’m sorry. I do trust you, Shellhead. You’re the only one I ever— It’s just… hard.”

Iron Man lets out a snort of laughter. “Sorry,” he says, “it’s not funny, I know—”

Steve lets out a laugh of his own. He’s sitting slumped against the bathroom door with sweat beading his forehead and a painful erection, but still, Shellhead can always make him smile.

“Maybe a little,” he offers.

“A very little,” Iron Man agrees. The tightness is still there, but there’s a smile in his voice.

In the ensuing silence, the smile begins to slide off Steve’s face. “You were right though. About me in the field. I’m in no position to fight right now. I’m—” He closes his eyes, and imagines what it’ll be like, with nothing to take his mind off this all-consuming lust. “I’m taking a leave of absence, effective immediately.”

“Oh, _no_ ,” Iron Man breathes, so soft and fast that it sounds almost involuntary. “No, Cap—”

“I’m a liability.”

Iron Man lets out a wounded noise. “Don’t say that. We need you, Winghead. The Avengers need you. _I_ need you.”

“It’ll only be a little while. Just a few more days, and then I’ll be back.” He has to believe that.

“There’s got to be a way— Maybe if you just found a partner, someone to work it off with. You said you didn’t used to… not alone, right? There are thousands—tens of thousands, hundreds, even—of people in New York alone who would be happy to— Hell, I know a few places in the Village, you’ll barely be able to get through the door without half a dozen Tony Stark lookalikes falling over themselves to take you home.”

Something about the way Iron Man says it—it sounds like he _knows_. Like he’s been there. Maybe on his own account, or maybe— Maybe what Iron Man said about Tony Stark being “equal opportunity” didn’t come from the tabloids at all.

Unbidden, the fantasy begins unspooling in his mind _—a dim, low-ceilinged room and a man at the bar with his back to Steve. He’d be dressed down—none of those fancy, bespoke suits, not here in an East Village dive—but Steve would know him anywhere, know the tension that always sat between those muscular shoulders, know the wet-tar gleam of his dark hair under the bar lights. Tony would shoot him a sidelong glance as Steve slid onto the stool next to him—one of those patented Tony Stark looks, warm and sly and insinuating, and then those sky-blue eyes would widen and those lips part and—_

“It wouldn’t,” Steve gasps out, “it wouldn’t be right. Not when I was thinking of— of—”

Iron Man makes a frustrated noise low in his throat. “You think anyone would care who you’re thinking about? Christ, do you know how many of those men are probably married with kids—?” but Steve is gone again, back to that smoky, low-lit room and

_“Ste—” Tony would cut himself short, swallowing back Steve’s name, eyes wide and wondering, and—_

_“Let me buy you a drink?” Steve would say, voice low and husky and so unlike his own, and Tony would gasp and sway forward, pupils blowing black and wanting and Steve would know that he wasn’t alone, that everything he’d felt, everything he wanted, Tony wanted too—_

_—in the alley beside the bar, Steve backs Tony up against the wall, and okay, maybe Tony is in one of his fancy suits after all. Iron Man is a dark, indistinct figure at the alley’s mouth, feet planted wide, arms folded to warn off potential intruders—_

Beneath his hands, Steve’s cock gives a needy twitch, and he allows himself one moment of shame for involving his best friend in these sordid fantasies before—

_Steve’s hands are fumbling at catch of Tony’s trousers and then he’s falling to his knees and swallowing Tony down as Tony groans, long and low, a sound trembling with all the desperate wanting Steve himself cannot express._

_“Oh, god,” he says, winding his fingers through Steve’s hair, “oh,_ god, _Steve,” with the taste of him heady and musky on Steve’s tongue and his length and his heat sheathed in Steve’s throat as Tony moans his name like a litany, “Steve, Steve, god, you feel so good, you feel like a dream, you don’t know how long I’ve wanted you, Steve,_ Winghead, _Steve—”_

Steve blinks, because that’s not right, Iron Man’s the one who calls him Winghead, not Tony—

“Winghead,” Iron Man is saying, “you all right in there?” There’s a pause and a few indistinct noises, and then Iron Man’s voice comes again, “I’ll go, if you want— If you need some, uh. Time to yourself, I just. Need to know you’re all right.”

“Fine,” Steve gets out, “ _fine_ ,” and it might be the biggest lie he’s ever told.

From the long, controlled breath that crackles through the voice modulator, it’s clear that Iron Man doesn’t believe him, but all he says is, “Okay. Okay. I’m going now. Just—just call, if you need me. Anything I can do, _anything_ —” His voice goes weirdly fervent on the last word, in a way that jolts right to Steve’s cock, but all Steve can picture is the darkness of Tony’s eyes, the ruddy flush staining his cheeks, the desire writ plain in every slack line of his face.

He doesn’t notice when Iron Man leaves, only knows, after his orgasm has finally burst over him, leaving him spent and shaken and horribly, desperately _still_ _wanting_ , that he’s alone.

He has no idea what he’ll say to Iron Man when he sees him again. No idea what he _can_ say, and for a moment he’s almost pathetically grateful at the way his mind keeps sliding away, drawn like a magnet to images of Tony—Tony, sleek and suave on the cover of a magazine—Tony, lurking in the kitchen at the tail end of some sleepless night, eyes underscored in blue, “Couldn’t sleep either, Cap? Hell of a night for it.”— _Tony_ , streaked with grease and up to his arms in machinery with a smile on his face that could power the world—

Steve can feel himself trying to get hard again. He thinks maybe he wants to cry.

_Tony climbing over him, the flat of his tongue cleaning the salt from Steve’s cheeks._

_“Hey, now, Cap. No worries. I’ve got you.”_

Steve looks down at the mess in his hand. Slowly, he raises his hand to his mouth, and imagines it’s the evidence of Tony’s pleasure he’s licking away, Tony’s come marking him like that, inside and out, _Tony_ —

It helps to imagine that, a little.

It helps, but not nearly enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next time: Iron Man makes Steve an offer he can't refuse. Yes, it's probably exactly what you're thinking. Slow burn? I don't know her.


	4. give it to me easy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covering kink meme parts 10 & 11
> 
> Thanks to Serinah for the beta!

“Winghead! Winghead, you in there?”

That’s Iron Man’s voice, accompanied by the unmistakable metallic thud of his gauntlet on the door.

“Scratch that, I  _ know _ you’re in there. Open up, will you?” There’s a brief pause. “Mr. Stark left for California a few hours ago, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re safe.” There’s a strange, half-ironic kind of heaviness to the words, but then, that could be anything at work—the modulator, the muffling effect of the wooden door and the pillow Steve currently has bent over his ears, Steve’s own mixed up brain.

It takes Steve a moment to process the words, but when he does, he rolls over towards the door, propping himself up on his elbows.

“But if Tony’s in California, shouldn’t you— What if he needs his bodyguard?”

The thought of Tony on his own, unprotected, because of  _ Steve _ —

“Mr. Stark decided that at the moment, the Avengers’ need is greater than his, seeing as how they’re currently down a member.”

Steve winces.

There’s a soft thunk as something comes to rest against the door—a hand, or a shoulder or a head, maybe.

“Goddammit,” Iron Man says. “I didn’t mean it like that, just— Open the door, would you? I know you haven’t eaten in three days.” Then, before Steve has a chance to reply, “And  _ yes _ , I know the serum means you can survive longer on no food, and  _ no _ , that doesn’t mean you don’t need to eat.”

Steve huffs out a breath, because sure, Iron Man’s got him there. “I’m not,” he says, and breaks off, looking around the room, at the crumpled sheets, at his uniform lying discarded on the floor, at the wastepaper basket overflowing with used tissues. “I’m not  _ decent _ ,” he says. It’s almost a mumble; there’s no  _ way _ Iron Man could have heard—

He hears a warm, crackling kind of static—Iron Man’s laugh. “Winghead,” Iron Man says, his voice so gentle and so fond that it makes something seize in Steve’s chest, “you’re the most decent man I know.”

Steve hesitates a bare moment longer. Then:

“All right,” he says, pushing himself out of bed and reaching for his boxers. “Just give me a moment.”

Iron Man glances around the room when Steve opens the door. Steve catches him at it, searching those blue eyes for a hint of surprise, of judgment, but Iron Man just hefts a bag into the air, a smile in his voice as he says: “I brought bagels.”

Steve’s shoulders slump. “I love you,” he says.

Iron Man gives a strangled sort of laugh. “Oh, yeah. Right back atcha, buddy. Anyway, just thought I’d stop by, bring you a bite to eat, see how you were doing with the whole…” He gestures vaguely with his free hand. “…situation.”

Steve flinches minutely. And here he’d managed to go almost a whole minute without thinking about his dick  _ or _ Tony Stark—not that he’s had much success at thinking about one without the other recently.

“I’m handling it,” he says, roughly.

“I’ll just bet you are.”

Steve shoots him a dirty look and Iron Man deflates a little.

“Sorry,” he says. “That was— Sorry.” He thrusts forth the bagels, as if by way of apology.

“It’s fine,” Steve says, accepting the offering. He’s not sure whether or not he means it. He opens the bag and decides that he does. There’s not a lot he isn’t willing to forgive in the face of sesame seed bagels. “Is there…?” He trails off, not wanting to be ungrateful.

“What do you take me for?” Iron Man asks in mock indignation. “There are two tubs of whitefish at the bottom. Though why you can’t go for cream cheese and lox like a normal person…”

“It’s traditional,” Steve informs him, trying not to be too obvious about the way he’s eyeing up the food.

Iron Man bursts out laughing. “God, it’s like you’re trying to devour them with your eyes. Go on, eat.”

Steve takes a seat on the end of his bed and begins rummaging through the bag.

“There’s a plastic knife if you want to cut the bagels,” Iron Man says helpfully. Steve’s face must do…  _ something _ , because Iron Man cocks his head, and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have the best track record with plastic knives,” Steve admits, a little sheepishly. “They tend to break on me.”

“Hot,” Iron Man says. “Hand it over; I’ll slice ’em for you.”

“There’s really no need…”

“It’s no trouble.”

Iron Man takes the bag from Steve, walks over to Steve’s desk, and returns a minute later with two neatly sliced bagel halves, slathered with whitefish spread.

“See? All done. Unless you want me to try and use the repulsors to toast ’em.”

“Would that work?” Steve asks, curiously.

“No reason why it wouldn’t. The main problem is that there’s nothing to contain the radiant heat—hard to toast the bagel without toasting everything else around it.”

“Mmmphgh,” Steve says, around a mouthful of bagel.

“Eloquently put,” Iron Man says. “Anyway, I should probably leave you to it…”

“You don’t have to,” Steve says, swallowing his bite and surprising himself a little. “I mean,” he adds, diffidently, “I’m not exactly, uh. Set up for company, but…”

“Well…” Iron Man shifts his weight, looking awkward. “As long as I’m not intruding…”

Steve’s mouth thins. “I’ll let you know before it gets to that point. But if you’re not comfortable…”

“I was talking about you and the bagels, Cap,” Iron Man says, the teasing note back in his voice.

“Oh. Well, in that case, you’re pretty much the ideal visitor, since I know you’re not going to try and steal any.” Then, as Iron Man continues to hesitate, “It’s making me dizzy, staring up at you. Come on. Sit.”

“Yes, sir,” Iron Man says, saluting smartly as he takes a seat on the opposite corner of the bed from Steve.

Steve ignores the little frisson the words send through him.

“So,” he says. “How are things? With the Avengers?”

“Well,” Iron Man says, leaning back a little. “Not much to tell, really. It’s all been pretty quiet. No shipwrecked aliens turning people into statues, no century-hopping megalomaniacs come to futz with the timeline, no clone armies, no disgruntled exes turning our teammates into mindless love slaves… We haven’t seen much of Enchantress recently, now I come to think of it. Maybe she’s found herself a new boyfriend? I was trying to tell her all about the wonders of eHarmony last time we fought, but she didn’t seem very receptive at the time.”

Steve nearly chokes trying not to laugh, which is all the encouragement Iron Man needs to launch into a highly dramatized and (Steve suspects) considerably embellished account of a team training exercise the previous day. Steve lets himself be drawn in to the story; between the food and Iron Man’s energetic storytelling, he can almost ignore the slow pooling of heat in his stomach, the creeping tension that steals into his limbs. How much longer does he have? Half an hour? Fifteen minutes? Ten?

Steve gives his head a shake and turns his attention back to his friend.

“—and there’s Wasp, sitting on the hammer, cool as you please. You should have seen the look on Thor’s face!”

Steve laughs with him. He’s not entirely sure what the joke is, having lost the thread of the story but it feels good, to laugh with Iron Man again. It’s so easy to know who he is, with Iron Man at his side.

“I wish I’d been there,” he says, thoughtlessly. Then he realizes what he’s said and it’s like a plug has been pulled—all the warmth and camaraderie drain from him at once.

Iron Man’s laughter dies away. “Yeah.”

Steve’s shoulders come up, a reflexive, defensive motion, and he turns a little to the side.

“They miss you, you know? The other Avengers. They were asking about you. They know we’re friends. They thought I might… know something, I guess.”

“What’d you tell them?” Steve asks. His voice comes out wrong, sort of taut and stifled all at once.

“I— Nothing, I didn’t tell them anything! Jesus, I’m making a mess of this. I just thought— They care about you, is all. It was kind of… abrupt, you getting KOed like that and then just taking a leave of absence. They were worried. Hell, I’m worried, and I more or less know what’s going on.”

“Well,” Steve says, with that same, unnatural stiffness. “As you can see, I’m fit as a fiddle. In the prime of life, even.”

“Cap, you’re  _ miserable _ . I hate seeing you like this. Can’t say I even understand it, really. I mean, this room looks a lot better than my bedroom when I was fourteen, though God knows I wouldn’t wish a second puberty on anyone.”

“It’s not the—the  _ physical _ —” Steve cuts himself short, biting his cheek in frustration.

When Iron Man speaks, his voice is as hesitant as Steve has ever heard it. “Is it— Is it really so terrible, to—to  _ want _ …?” He trails off, leaving the question unfinished.

Steve is silent a long time. When he speaks, it’s all he can do to keep his voice from shaking. It shocks him, how badly he wants Iron Man to understand.

“Growing up, I… There was so much I wanted to do that I just— I couldn’t. Too sickly. Frail. But I was raised to believe there was something greater than the physical. Something  _ more _ . My body would fail again and again, but this—” Steve touches his forehead, and then his chest. “This never did.”

Iron Man is silent, perfectly still—patient, attentive.

“Then there was Rebirth and things… changed. This body is—was—” Steve frowns and shakes his head over the confusion of tenses “—a miracle. All of these things—it was like, I just had to think them and I could do them… And I know—I knew it wasn’t  _ my _ miracle, that it didn’t belong to me, not really. It was all in service of a higher cause. But still, when the first cycle came, it— In a way, it wasn’t a surprise. All bodies have their weakness. I knew—I  _ know _ how to deal with that. I was still— I still had—” The hand resting over his heart curls into a fist.

“Winghead…”

“It’s in my head,” Steve says, voice low. He doesn’t look at Iron Man as he speaks. “Everything else I can—I  _ have _ dealt with, but this time— It starts and my mind just  _ goes _ and I can’t control it and I can’t stop  _ thinking _ about— and I— I—”

“Cap,” Iron Man says, with infinite gentleness. “You know this doesn’t make you any lesser, don’t you? This isn’t about who you are, it’s just… just something you’re dealing with.”

Steve stares resolutely into his lap.

It’s so easy to believe him, that’s the thing. So easy, with Iron Man here to anchor him. But he knows that’s a dangerous way of thinking. He can feel the need coming upon him, like clouds massing in the sky before a storm. Soon Iron Man will leave and Steve will be all alone with his mindless, boundless lust.

“A couple of years back,” Iron Man says, “something… happened. In my life. A—a family thing.”

Startled, Steve glances sharply over at his friend. Iron Man  _ never _ talks about his personal life.

“It was… big, what happened, and what’s worse is that a lot of people knew about it. All those damn platitudes they’d trot out for the occasion, and look so damn  _ pleased _ with themselves, as if they were imparting some kind of wisdom, as if it helped, as if any of it wasn’t something I’d heard dozens of times before—” Iron Man breaks off, shaking his head. “I think my least favorite was ‘ _ This too shall pass _ .’ Because that wasn’t just a cliché, it was a  _ lie _ . It wasn’t the sort of thing that passes. It was the sort of thing that never does. The sort of thing that splits your life into ‘before’ and ‘after.’ And I thought to myself then, I’m never going to say those words to anyone in my life. Except that in your case…”

Iron Man reaches out and nudges Steve on the arm. It has no force behind it, but Steve lets himself sway with the motion.

“In your case it’s  _ true _ . You’re on a countdown timer as we speak. Every minute that passes is one minute closer to all of this ending.”

Steve fights the urge to rub at the spot where Iron Man touched him. His skin still tingles with the ghost of the contact.

“Until the next time,” he says, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.

“But you said it’s not normally like this, right? This is a fluke.”

“What if—” Steve’s tongue darts out to wet dry lips. “What if it’s not? What if something… changed?”

Iron Man doesn’t hesitate. His voice rings with such confidence that Steve has a wild impulse to grab him by the shoulders and fit his mouth over the opening of the faceplate, as if he could drink that certainty from the other man’s lips.

“Then we’ll deal with that when we get there.”

_ We. _

Steve’s hands spasm. He tips back his head and stares at the ceiling. “It’s been fifteen days,” he says. “Since it started.”

Iron Man coughs. “Would it be weird if I said I already figured that out?”

“Eighteen days,” Steve tells him. “That’s the record. That’s the longest it’s ever lasted.”

“Three days is a long time. A lot can happen. Or, you know. Stop happening. As the case may be. Look, worst comes to worst?” Iron Man shrugs. “Guess you’ll have to break another record.  Figures that the only ones you’ve got left to break are your own. I honestly don’t know why they even bother with the Olympics anymore; you’ve got ’em all beat to flinders.”

“I’m pretty sure the Super Soldier Serum counts as a performance enhancing drug.”

Iron Man shakes his head sadly. “People have always been afraid of progress.”

The words spark through Steve’s pores and settle just below his skin. It sounds so much like the sort of thing Tony would say.

Steve’s mouth twists.

“I know it’ll stop soon, I  _ know _ , but—”

_ But what if it doesn’t? _

Iron Man sighs. “I wish you’d consider telling a doctor. Or at least a biologist. They might be able to help. At the very least they could track hormone levels, that kind of thing. Get some idea of how things are progressing…”

Steve is shaking his head.

Iron Man lays a tentative hand on Steve’s shoulder. Steve flinches a little at the strangeness of the metal against his skin, but when Iron Man goes to draw the hand away he says, almost without thinking about it, “Don’t.”

He bites his lip, but he can’t find it in himself to draw away.

“Don’t?” Iron Man repeats.

Steve ducks his head, face burning. “It… helps. A little.”

He finds he likes the weight of it.

Iron Man lets out a soft, sighing sound. His fingers begin to move on Steve’s shoulder, kneading the muscle. Steve shivers and leans back into the touch.

“Look at you,” Iron Man says, and his voice through the modulator sounds so terribly sad. “You’re just one giant knot.”

“You’re t-telling me,” Steve gets out, and is rewarded with the staticky crackle of Iron Man’s laugh.

Tony. Tony has a nice laugh.

The thought is accompanied by a familiar, prickling warmth.

“You’re going to have to go soon,” Steve says, ducking his head. “I can—can feel it coming back.”

“You’re sure there’s nothing we can do? I just— Surely this would be better if you weren’t alone? Are you sure you won’t consider an escort?”

Steve shakes his head. It’s too intimate, this need, in a way it never was before—too raw and terribly open. “I can’t,” he says, miserably, and Iron Man rewards him by working his thumb deeper into Steve’s shoulder. “N-no strangers.”

Iron Man’s grip tightens in sympathy and Steve lets out a low groan. That had felt good—much, much too good.

Iron Man’s hand stills on Steve’s shoulder.

“No strangers,” he repeats, as if to himself.

Steve shakes his head and pulls out of Iron Man’s grasp. “You need to go,” he says, hoarsely.

Iron Man moves back a little, but makes no move to leave.

“Yeah,” he says, “okay, I can do that. If you want me to.” There’s an odd note to his voice. “Or I can— I can stay.”

The room is too hot and there’s something wrong with Steve’s ears.

“What did you say?”

“You said no strangers, but I— I could help you out. If you wanted.”

Oh god. To have Iron Man stay— To be touched—

To not have to be alone…

“I can’t ask you to do that,” Steve rasps. “I would never—”

Iron Man gives a strangled kind of laugh. “Believe me, Cap, it’s not a hardship.”

“But you’re—” He gestures helplessly at the suit.

“I’m still a man, under all this metal. I’m only a man.” There’s a tinge of bitterness to the words.

Steve shakes his head. Iron Man doesn’t understand, and he has to  _ make _ him understand, before the need is too great for him to think about such things.

“Your identity,” he says.

“Yeah,” says Iron Man. “You’d have to be, uh. Blindfolded I’m afraid. Although that might help, I suppose. If you’re going to be thinking of…” He gives his head a little shake. “And I’d still have to leave a lot of the suit on. I don’t know if that’s too much of a turn off—”

“Tony,” Steve blurts. “Tony designed the suit.”

There’s a charged silence.

“Yeah,” Iron Man says slowly. “Yeah, he did. Can’t say I expected you to be one for an engineering kink, but—”

Steve reaches out and grabs one gauntleted hand. He smooths his thumb over the palm, gently tugging and bending the digits, marveling at the smoothness, the delicacy of the articulation.

“Okay.” Even through the voice modulator, Steve can tell that Iron Man’s voice has gone breathy. “I guess that answers that.”

“You don’t have to,” Steve tells him, hoarsely. “You know what it’s— who I’ll be thinking of.”

And for a moment, it’s not Iron Man’s hand he holds but  _ Tony’s, and Tony is leaning in and brushing a whisper-soft kiss against Steve's lips, and then again, harder, and then again, open mouthed and wet— _

“I can’t see how I’d forget.”

“You don’t have to,” Steve repeats, and he wants, he  _ wants _ —

“What do you want me to do?” Iron Man asks. “Just tell me what you need.”

Steve looks at him. The faceplate is as unreadable as ever, but the way Iron Man is sitting, body angled forwards, leaning towards Steve ever so slightly—the way his hand lies so still and docile in Steve’s own…

Steve feels something inside himself give way.

“Cap?”

Steve closes his eyes and wraps his fingers around the wrist of Iron Man’s captured hand. He gives a little tug, pulling his friend closer.

“Stay,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boys, boys, whitefish and cream cheese and lox are BOTH acceptable bagel toppings. (what is fluff even? is it arguing about bagels? it is, right? genuinely I have no idea what's going on there. maybe I was hungry?) I'm just saying, though, love is knowing how the other person eats their bagel.
> 
> next time: Let's not be coy here, friends. You know what's coming. Or should I say, _who's_ coming. ;)


	5. and let me try with pleasured hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covering kink meme parts 12-14
> 
> Thanks to Serinah for the beta! <3

There’s a name thrumming through Steve’s veins, heady as wine, but Steve ignores it as best he can—focuses on what’s before him, because Iron Man’s here and Iron Man’s going to stay and Steve won’t have to do this alone.

He takes a steadying breath and shoots a glance at his friend, wondering what to do next. He rubs his thumb against smooth metal and realizes he’s still holding Iron Man’s wrist.

“Sorry,” he says, releasing his grip.

Before Steve can pull away, Iron Man’s hand slides forward to catch Steve’s, squeezing in reassurance.

“Hey now. None of that. I can practically feel the cogs in that head of yours turning.”

“Says the man in the robot suit,” Steve mumbles, not meeting Iron Man’s gaze.

“What is this, an H.G. Wells novel? I’ll have you know that my robot suit is powered by far more sophisticated technology than cogs. Steam-power at the _least_.” Now Iron Man’s the one tugging Steve closer. “Look. The whole point of this is to help you feel good, yeah?”

Steve’s lips part, and it’s all he can do not to echo the question back. _Yeah?_ He… he _wants_ that. God, it’s shameful how badly he wants that, shameful the greed and intensity of his desire.

“And that’s not going to happen if you’re stuck up here—” Iron Man’s other gauntlet comes up to tap Steve lightly on the temple. “—the whole time. Let me help you. Let me make this good for you.”

Steve opens his mouth in a half-hearted protest, but Iron Man cuts him short.

“I want to.”

Steve shuts his mouth. The words echo in his mind, the sound twisting, shedding its computer-modified artificiality, taking on a familiar accent—cultured, but just a little bit rough at the edges, like singed velvet. _I want to_.

“Okay,” he says, hardly aware of who he’s saying it to. It doesn’t matter. Either way he doesn’t have the will left in him to refuse.

“Okay,” Iron Man affirms. “So. What can I do for you?”

The sheer _filth_ of the images that immediately present themselves to Steve’s mind momentarily robs him of the ability to speak. _Fingers knotting in his hair, tugging his head back as another metal-jacketed hand works its way between the cheeks of his ass. Tony made those gauntlets, Jesus_ _God_ _, designed and shaped the metal that even now is slowly pressing into Steve’s most intimate places—_

Steve pulls his hand from Iron Man’s grasp and scrapes his fingers through his hair, hiding his face in his forearms.

“Okay. Bad question,” Iron Man says. “Let me try again. What do you need?”

Another unanswerable question. Steve wants to believe that what he needs, more than anything else, is not to need anything at all, but his cock is growing harder by the minute, and Tony a bright-eyed specter in his mind, and Iron Man is here and asking what he _needs_? He needs release, he needs solitude, he needs not to be alone, he needs to know how to fit inside his own skin—

“You’re absolutely right,” Iron Man says gravely, carrying on a one-sided conversation. “That was far too open-ended. Forget the metaphysics, let’s stick with something concrete. What do you usually do?”

Steve lowers his arms in order to shoot Iron Man a look. What, does Iron Man want him to _say_ it?

Iron Man gazes back expectantly. The New Yorker in Steve does the answering with a few expressive flicks of the wrist.

Iron Man lets out a startled huff of laughter. “What, just like that? Not a big believer in foreplay, huh?”

“Not when I’m…” Steve grimaces, trying to find the least awkward way of putting it.

“Flying solo?” Iron Man suggests, and puts up his hands as if to ward off Steve’s glare. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll stop helping.”

“…on my own.”

“And when you’re with a partner?” There’s no trace of judgement or expectation in Iron Man’s voice. It sounds like a casual question, like this is a perfectly ordinary thing to discuss, and Steve supposes it is. Lord knows he’d heard far worse bandied about during the war. Maybe it would help to think of it like that. Just a little barracks talk between friends.

“We did…” Steve shrugs. “Normal things. Kissing. Things like that. But they… didn’t know about my… And it wasn’t so, um. Intense then, and anyway, they weren’t…” Steve waves a hand vaguely towards Iron Man’s suited body.

“They weren’t rattling around inside a pressurized tin can,” Iron Man says. “Yes, that does change things a bit, doesn’t it. Well. Do you _want_ to cut straight to the…?” He repeats Steve’s earlier gesture. Somehow, when he does it, it looks about ten times as obscene.

“ _No_ ,” Steve says. The word comes out far too vehement. “I mean, not yet. I…” He looks away, cheeks burning. Here’s Iron Man offering to do this extraordinary thing for him, and Steve can’t even figure out what he _wants_.

“Tell you what,” Iron Man says, very gentle, very kind. “We’ll take it slow for now, how’s that sound? I mean, I’d like that. Like to take my time with you, while that’s possible. We’ll keep it to what feels good, and when you need more, just tells me.”

The rush of gratitude Steve feels is almost humiliating in its intensity. Biting his lip, he nods.

“It’s a plan, then.” There’s a smile in Iron Man’s voice. “The shoulder massage from before. How was that?”

“Good,” Steve says, a little gruffly. “It was really…”

“Well, ‘good’ _is_ what we’re shooting for. ‘Really’ too, if we can swing it. If you kneel on the bed, I can— Yeah, just like that.”

Steve feels Iron Man settle behind him, moving forward on his knees until Steve is just inside the vee of his thighs. Iron Man’s legs exert a firm but gentle pressure against Steve’s hips. It feels nice. Comforting. Like he’s being held but not confined.

He’s surprised, a little, by how clear his head is. He’s hard, yes, but not painfully so. The need is undeniably present, but not yet a torment.

Iron Man is grounding him.

He places one heavy hand on Steve’s shoulder, and Steve feels a rush of tension leave him. The other hand curls around the back of Steve’s neck, ruffling the short hairs at his neck. The metal isn’t as cold as Steve would have imagined, but it’s still cool enough to make him suck in an audible breath.

Iron Man immediately lifts his hands, and it’s all Steve can do not to whine at the loss of contact.

“Too cold?”

“N-no,” Steve lies. “It’s fine.” Or at least it will be, once Iron Man starts touching him again.

He thinks there are a lot of things he could bear, with Iron Man touching him.

“You’ve got a lousy poker face,” Iron Man informs him.

“You can’t see my face.”

“I’m extrapolating. Also, you’re breaking out in goosebumps.”

“It’s fine,” Steve says. “I can deal with it.”

“I know you can, but this isn’t about dealing with it. This is about feeling good, remember?”

Steve clenches his jaw. He isn’t going to beg. He isn’t that far gone.

He can still feel Iron Man’s hands hovering over his shoulders.

“I’d like to try something, if that’s okay with you.”

The word _anything_ springs to his lips with alarming ease. Steve’s made it most of the way through his cycle on his own, but just these past few minutes have him halfway to undone.

“Sure,” he says, as casually as he can manage.

“I’d need you to…” Iron Man plucks at the collar of Steve’s t-shirt.

Steve can’t hold back the full-body shudder of relief. He yanks the shirt over his head and tosses it heedlessly onto the floor.

Behind him, Iron Man inhales sharply.

“What?” Steve demands, feeling suddenly self-conscious. He was too eager, he knew. Undisciplined. _Wanton_ —

“Nothing! At least, nothing bad. Just… wow.”

“You’ve seen me shirtless before,” Steve reminds him. He still feels embarrassed, but there’s a strange edge of pleasure to it now. Iron Man likes the way he looks.

Maybe Tony would—

No, Steve isn’t going there. Not for as long as he can help it.

“Well, yeah, but not like—” Iron Man cuts off. His voice when he resumes is a little stilted. “Sorry. The last thing you need right now is me perving all over you.”

“It’s fine.”

Iron Man’s skepticism is almost palpable.

“I’m glad you—” Steve tries. “If we’re going to do this it’s… I _want_ you to—  I mean, it’s good that you’re…” He trails off in frustration.

“Oh, I am. Don’t you worry about that.”

The smile is back in Iron Man’s voice, but there’s something else there too, that twisty, half-ironic edge that has been appearing more and more frequently over the past two weeks. Something’s off here, and Steve knows he should put a stop to this until he can find out what it is, but he’s so terribly selfish in his need. All he wants is Iron Man’s hands back on him and—

One of Iron Man’s hands closes over Steve’s, and Steve realizes his hands are balled into fists.

“Hey, what’d I say about overthinking things?” Iron Man says, gently chiding. “My fault, really. We were getting a little off track. Let’s see if…”

Steve gasps as a stripe of radiant heat licks down his back.

Behind him, Iron Man makes a pleased noise.

“Wh—” Steve stammers. “What was that?”

“Repulsor,” Iron Man says. “Turned it almost all the way down. Not too much?” he adds, with a touch of anxiety.

Too much? Too _much_?

“I don’t know,” Steve manages. “Why don’t you try again and see?”

Iron Man chuckles. “How scientifically minded of you. I know there was a reason I l—”

A groan tears from Steve’s throat, drowning out the rest of Iron Man’s words as twin spots of flame and pressure carve trails down either side of Steve’s spine. They _must_ be repulsors—Steve can feel it now, the force underlying the heat.

The heat dies away to the faintest warmth. “So what’s the verdict?” Iron Man asks.

Steve’s groan this time has little to do with pleasure. “D-don’t tease.”

“You never let me have any fun.” The huskiness in Iron Man’s voice belies the complaint.

Then the heat is back, working small circles into Steve’s trapezius muscles, and Steve _melts_. It’s an almost surreal kind of pleasure, like he’s being massaged by beams of midsummer sunlight. He lets his eyes flutter shut and imagines himself _on a beach somewhere sunny, the kind of place he’s seen in magazines. A pair of garishly colored drinks lie abandoned to the side, and Tony is behind him, digging deep into Steve’s back with hot, clever fingers—_

“Wow. You really like this, huh?” _Tony says_.

No. Not Tony, Iron Man.

Steve blinks, trying to refocus on reality. Speech takes a surprising amount of effort. “Feels…” He gives up on holding his head upright, lets it droop onto his chest, and is rewarded with a stroke of heat up the back of his neck. “You could,” he suggests, “more, if you…”

“Like this?”

The repulsors flare hot and hard.

“ _Yesss_ ,” Steve hisses. “Yes, that’s—” The pressure increases, and the heat is incredible, a mouthwatering pleasure just this side of pain. There’s a roaring in his ears and Steve is no longer quite sure if it’s the roaring of surf or the sound of his own pulse. “Oh. Oh, that feels… Like that, yeah, please, _Tony_ —”

All motion behind him ceases. Steve’s brain catches up with his ears, and he jerks forward, away from Iron Man.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t…”

He hears Iron Man shifting behind him and then a faint, gentle warmth tracing slow circles over the skin of his back. Steve almost shudders at the comfort of it.

“Hey,” Iron Man says. “Nothing to be sorry about.”

“Yeah?” Steve asks, hating how uncertain he sounds, how needy.

“Yeah,” Iron Man confirms. “You already told me all about your cycle and Mr. Stark. If anything, it’s a compliment to my skill, that you’re already too distracted to filter your thoughts.”

A smile flickers at the corners of Steve’s mouth, almost despite himself. “I mean, I’m not complaining so fa— _oooh_.” The words collapse into a moan as one of Iron Man’s hands sneaks around the curve of Steve’s ribs, dragging warmth up his sternum and then down again towards his belly.

Iron Man has moved forward, closing the distance Steve put between them. Now he lifts his spare hand to Steve’s upper arm, tugging him gently backwards until Steve’s shoulders are resting against Iron Man’s chest. The metal there is still cool, a pleasant counterpoint to the heat now dancing across his torso.

“So no,” Iron Man continues, voice low and almost in Steve’s ear. “I don’t mind if you’re thinking about Mr. Stark. And in all likelihood, neither would he.”

Steve has allowed his eyelids to droop, but at that, they fly open, lips parting on a gasp. His hands clench, one knotting in the sheet, the other scrabbling against the smooth surface of Iron Man’s armored thigh.

Iron Man’s hands have stilled again. “That okay?” he asks.

Steve blinks his eyes, as if that could dispel the force of breathtaking lust which had just slammed into him. Iron Man is asking him a question, but he can’t quite seem to parse—

“I thought it might help to talk about— But if it’s too weird, I totally understand.”

Steve isn’t so lust-addled yet that he can’t decipher the meaning behind Iron Man’s words. It’s just that that meaning seems so utterly incredible. Iron Man’s offering to dirty talk about his own boss just to please Steve, and he’s worried _Steve_ might be uncomfortable?

“It’s—” Steve starts to say something banal and inadequate, like, “it’s good,” or “it’s fine,” but the words won’t leave his mouth.

“Speechless, huh? I can work with that.” Iron Man drags a thumb along the nape of Steve’s neck and Steve shivers and arches into the touch. “Good speechless or bad speechless?”

Steve screws up his eyes. He can’t possibly ask for this, it’s too much—

“Cap?”

Iron Man’s hands are running back and forth over Steve’s shoulders and upper arms, a comfort and a torment.

To hell with it. Steve rolls his head back to give Iron Man an unimpeded view and gestures towards his lap, at the bulge clearly visible in his too-tight jeans.

Iron Man inhales in a hiss of static. His hands clench briefly on Steve’s shoulders.

“The good kind, then.”

Steve nods, still not trusting himself to answer directly. “Do you mind if I…?” His fingers hover over the fastening of his jeans.

Iron Man’s laugh sounds a little strained. “I think I can say pretty categorically that I _do not mind_.”

Steve pops the button, unable to stifle the little moan of relief. He’s barely managed to fumble open his fly when one of Iron Man’s repulsors drags a straight line of heat and pressure from his navel to his collarbone and Steve is lifting his hips and arching into the sensation. The other gauntlet comes down to hover over his balls, and even through two layers of fabric it’s almost enough to blank out Steve’s mind.

“Jesus,” Iron Man says. “ _Look_ at you,” and Steve lets out a little whimper, whether of agreement or protest he couldn’t say.

Iron Man’s voice drops low and pensive, in a way Steve is nearly positive has to be put on. “I wonder if Mr. Stark ever realized this particular application for the repulsor technology.”

Steve freezes, hips still suspended in midair.

“I wonder,” Iron Man continues, as if he has no idea of the effect he’s having, “what he’d think if he saw this—saw you like this.” Something dark is curling around the edges of his voice. “Saw all the things I’m doing to you with his invention.”

Steve makes a throaty, desperate sound that might have been humiliating if he had enough brainpower left to process it. Then he’s rising on his knees, shoving his jeans down his hips, and Iron Man is helping him, bracing him as he sits back and kicks them the rest of the way off.

Steve turns around so he’s straddling Iron Man now. Iron Man’s got one hand on his ass, supporting him, and the other trailing heat up and down his spine.

“Touch me,” Steve rasps.

Iron Man swallows. It must have been loud, for the suit’s microphones to have picked it up at all.

“Sure,” he says. “Yeah, I can—” The hand on Steve’s ass slides up, starts tugging on the waistband of Steve’s boxers. “Fingers might be a little cold, but…”

The thought of Iron Man getting him off with Tony’s technology is almost hotter than Steve can stand, but it’s not what he _needs_. He needs contact, needs connection—the intimate friction of flesh against flesh.

“Not with the—the armor. Just you. Need to feel you, _please_ —”

Iron Man groans, long and low. “You’re killing me here. I thought Captain America never killed?”

Steve knows, dimly, that it’s meant to be a joke, but it’s not _right_ , it’s not what he needs, and he’s shaking his head— “N-not Captain America,” he says, almost a plea. He can’t be the symbol now, can’t be the flag. “Just Steve.”

“Steve,” Iron Man echoes, sounding—and this can’t be right, but—sounding almost reverent. “ _Steve_.” He touches Steve’s cheek with the back of his gauntlet and Steve turns his head, trying clumsily to kiss his hand.

“You want me to touch you, Steve?”

Steve lifts his hips again, beyond shame now. “ _Please_.”

Iron Man’s arms come forward and haul Steve against his chest, squeezing with a delicious and irresistible pressure. He hooks his chin over Steve’s shoulder and rocks them both back and forth. His voice crackles like wood on a fire, and Steve thinks of heat and flame and smoke-stained ruin.

“Okay,” Iron Man says. “Okay.”

* * *

“I was, uh. Serious about the blindfold thing though,” Iron Man adds. “Sorry.”

Steve shakes his head. “Whatever you need,” he says. It comes out almost like a plea.

Iron Man’s fingers flex, seemingly involuntarily, where they grasp Steve’s ass. Steve shudders and arches against him as Iron Man buries his helmeted face in Steve’s neck.

“Pretty sure that’s my line,” he mumbles.

“ _Anything_ ,” Steve says, for the pleasure of hearing Iron Man’s gasp. He’s so turned on he can barely see straight as it is. A blindfold is hardly a hardship.

“Okay,” Iron Man says. “Yeah. Do you have a scarf, or…?”

Steve pushes him back a little. Reaching past him, he grabs the bedsheet in both hands and tears off a long, narrow strip.

Iron Man lets out a staticky breath. “Or that,” he says, sounding a little unsteady. “That works too.”

Steve holds out the strip of cloth.

“You want _me_ to…?”

Not trusting himself to speak, Steve nods.

Iron Man’s fingers flex again but he accepts the cloth.

“Close your eyes.”

Steve lets his eyelids flutter shut.

Iron Man’s gauntleted hands are strong enough to crush steel—Steve knows, he’s seen it happen—but you’d never guess it from the way he cradles Steve’s head, as if he’s holding something infinitely precious. A metallic thumb brushes over Steve’s cheekbone and then Steve feels the roughness of cotton wrapping around his head, over his closed eyes and the bridge of his nose.

“Not too tight?”

Steve tries to shake his head, but one of Iron Man’s hands is still pressed against his skull, holding the makeshift blindfold in place. He wets dry lips and forces himself to speak.

“Keep going.”

The darkness behind Steve’s closed lids deepens with every pass of the cloth around his head. There’s a desperate kind of unreality to it, the imposed blindness and the blazing need, as if Iron Man’s gentle (too, too gentle) touch is the only thing that still binds him to the world.

Steve feels a little tug on the cloth at the back of his head, and then Iron Man’s hands are falling away.

“All done.”

Steve opens his eyes from dark into further darkness.

“I can’t see anything,” he says, almost marveling at it. The serum has improved his night vision along with the rest of his senses, made him far more sensitive to light. He can scarcely remember the last time he knew a darkness so absolute.

The realization of Steve’s vulnerability seems to hit them both at the same time. Steve lets out a choked little sound of need, just as Iron Man asks, with some anxiety, “That okay?”

For answer, Steve reaches out, clumsily seeking out Iron Man’s hand. Capturing it in both of his, he raises it to his lips, kissing first the back, and then the palm.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Iron Man slides his hand down to cup Steve’s jaw, thumb coming to rest on Steve’s lower lip, tugging it gently downwards, gliding to and fro across its smooth underside as if sampling the slickness it finds there.

“So trusting,” Iron Man murmurs, almost to himself.

And despite the arousal that already has him rolling his hips in small, needy circles, Steve can’t help but smile.

“Of course. It’s you.”

Iron Man’s hand stills.

“Yeah,” he says, “right.”

His hand falls away, and Steve just barely restrains himself from chasing after the touch.

Fortunately, Iron Man’s next words more than make up for the loss.

“Anyway,” he says. “I’m just going to go, uh. Take off the armor now…”

Steve can’t prevent the noise that escapes him then, nasal and needy and high-pitched, a sound with no dignity to it.

“Looking forward to that, huh? Can’t deny it’ll be a relief. That groin plate’s been getting mighty uncomfortable.”

As he speaks, Steve can feel him moving, feel his weight shifting across the mattress and finally lifting entirely.

“Like I said, I can’t remove all of it. The helmet will have to stay, and the chest plate, but the rest of it… I mean, if you want—”

“ _Yes_ ,” Steve all but hisses, hand flying to his crotch to grind against the hardness there.

There’s already a damp patch at the front of his boxers. Steve hesitates, then pulls the boxers off and tosses them aside, and then there’s nothing but the darkness at his eyes and the rough tangle of sheets below and the coolness of the air against his heated skin and his terrible, burning desire.

He can hear, distantly, a series of clinks and clunks that must be the sound of Iron Man undressing, but without Iron Man’s voice, without the anchor of his touch the sounds are so distant from him they might as well be a memory or a dream. Steve’s balls are tight, his cock aching. He needs to be touched, needs it like a fish needs water—like he used to need air, only he thinks now maybe he needs this more. Why is no one touching him?

_“You’ve got hands don’t you?” a familiar voice asks, and Tony’s face swims into view, hot and teasing and tender all at once._

_“It’s not enough,” Steve tells him, but he’s already wrapping one hand around his cock, bringing the other to cradle his balls, and—_

_“I know,” Tony says sympathetically, “but it’ll take the edge off. Lean back against the headboard, will you? And spread your knees—good, just like that.” He shakes his head. His eyes are fathomless—dark wells of desire, edged in blue. “Get a load of you. Better than Christmas morning. That’s really all for me?”_

_All of it, Steve thinks, anything you want, everything—_

“Getting things started without me, I see.”

That’s Iron Man’s voice, warm and artificial and much, much closer than he’d expected.

Steve flushes, and slows his hand, but doesn’t stop. He won’t be ashamed of this. All he was doing was taking the edge off; it wasn’t like it counted—

He must have said that part out loud because Iron Man huffs out a laugh.

“Doesn’t count unless I’m the one doing it? I’m flattered.”

The mattress shifts and depresses as Iron Man climbs onto the bed, settling near Steve’s parted knees. Anticipation swells inside him until he’s well-nigh choking with it.

“Though I’m sad I wasn’t there for the start of this, whether it counted or not,” Iron Man continues, voice husky even through the modulator. “It must have been quite the sight.”

“Maybe if you’d been a little faster,” Steve gasps out, hips canting up so he can thrust into his fist, and it’s better, a little, but not nearly enough, and Iron Man is here—why isn’t he doing anything?

“Even I can’t break the light-speed barrier,” Iron Man tells him. “And if I couldn’t with _this_ kind of incentive, I don’t know that anyone is _ever_ —”

“For god’s _sake_ ,” Steve groans. He’s going to work himself raw at this rate, and Iron Man is just _sitting there—_

“What is it?” Iron Man asks, with sharp concern. “What’s wrong?”

Steve bites down until his jaw aches, tosses his head from side to side.

“Hey, shh. None of that—” and then there are two hands running up his thighs and rubbing at his hips—two warm, _human hands_.

Steve lets out a sob of relief. There are tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.

A groan rips from his throat as the hands disappear again.

“Ca— Steve?”

“Don’t— just— _please_ —”

“Don’t what?”

Steve’s abs tighten as he hauls himself into a half-seated position, hands still tugging fruitlessly at his cock.

“Steve? I— You’re sending a lot of mixed signals, here.”

“Don’t _tease_ ,” Steve chokes out, and sags back into the mattress. It’s not enough. _Nothing_ is enough. How had he ever managed to find pleasure at his own hands? How—?

And then there’s warmth on his hip and a hand settling over the one working his cock.

“Hey,” Iron Man’s voice says. “Hey, shh. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tease. I’ve got you now.”

Steve gives himself over to Iron Man’s hands, letting his own fall to the side. The touch at his side slides along the line that joins his hip to his pubic bone, down the inside of his thigh to cup his balls, rolling them gently inside their sack.

“Yeah?” Iron Man asks.

Steve moans out an affirmative.

“Yeah,” Iron Man agrees, tugging gently on Steve’s testicles as his other hand glides up and down Steve’s shaft. Steve wonders if anything in his life has ever felt this good.

(He wonders how much better it would be if Tony—)

(No. He won’t dwell on that, he _refuses_ —)

“You know,” Iron Man says, and his voice might almost be called conversational if not for a certain hoarseness, “I was planning on asking for lube, but you don’t actually need it, do you?”

“M’not circumcised,” Steve mumbles.  

“No, you are not,” Iron Man agrees, “and believe me, I’m enjoying that, but I was mostly talking about all this.” He swipes a finger through the precum beading at the head of his cock, dragging across his slit in a way that makes Steve moan and rock his hips. “You’re so _wet_.”

Steve’s mouth twists, because he hates that word, “wet.” As if his need somehow made him less of a man—

“Not,” he rasps.

“You’re leaking like a fountain,” Iron Man informs him, and Steve can feel shame spiraling up within him, chased fast by anger, before Iron Man adds, fervent as a prayer: “It’s just about the hottest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. God, what I wouldn’t give for a taste—”

Steve claps his hand over his mouth to stifle the noise that erupts out of his throat.

“No, don’t do that,” Iron Man says. “Let me hear you, god, you’re perfect.”

“I’m not,” Steve mumbles, through his spread of fingers, “I’m too…”

Iron Man’s fist tightens on Steve’s cock and Steve gives a muffled shout, thrusting upwards into his grip.

“ _Yes_ ,” Iron Man rasps. “Just like that, _Christ_. _Perfect_ —”

There are stars in the darkness behind Steve’s eyes, bright sparks of pleasure streaking across an empty sky.

“I want to touch you _everywhere_ ,” Iron Man tells him, low and fast. “God, _god_ , I don’t have enough hands for this. Think you could help me out, gorgeous?”

_“You’ve got hands, don’t you?”_

“Wh—what do you—?” Steve stammers.

“Your chest. See how tight your nipples are? Mm, they’re just—oh, wow, just _crying out_ to be touched. Maybe you could—”

Steve runs a hand across his left pec, as much to shut Iron Man up as anything, but his fingers catch on the puckered nub of his nipple, and he and Iron Man groan in concert.

“You like that?”

Steve rolls his head aside, nods into his shoulder.

“You should feel good,” Iron Man says, voice hoarse but ringing with conviction, like he's stating one of the fundamental truths of the universe. “You deserve to feel good everywhere, in every way a person can.”

Steve knows he should object, but his head is filled with noise and he can’t seem to figure out how or why.

“You could do it again. If you wanted. Both hands, you could— Jesus.” Steve feels a shock of cold metal as Iron Man rests his head against his thigh. “I think I’m catching religion here.”

Steve kind of wants to laugh, and he kind of wants to groan, and he mostly wants to do something about the heat and pressure slowly mounting in every limb.

“S’not contagious,” he manages.

“Is this really the time to be debating epidemiology?” Iron Man mutters into the crook of Steve’s knee.

“Th—theology.”

Iron Man’s hand releases his balls to swat him lightly on the ass. “That’s about three more syllables than you should be able to manage right now. Go back to playing with your tits, leave me to—”

Steve gasps aloud, even as his hands fly to his chest, kneading at his—at his— God, he can barely bring himself to even _think_ the word—

_“Your tits,” Tony tells him. “You can say it, Steve. It’s all right. I like it.”_

“Oh god,” Iron Man is saying, “god, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was—”

“Don’t stop.”

“Don’t—don’t what? I’m not stopping, I— You don’t mean— You don’t want me to talk, I’m just making a mess—”

“ _Don’t stop_.”

Iron Man swears under his breath, his fingers digging into Steve’s ass.

“Right. Yeah, okay. We were talking about your—your t-tits, right?”

Steve bucks upwards at the word, his entire body from his lower back to his feet leaving the mattress.

Iron Man makes a long, drawn-out sound, low and guttural. “S-see, I don’t think you’ve been paying them enough attention. I think they must be feeling awfully n-neglected. M-maybe you should go a little harder. Have you tried pinching them? Some people like that. Some people like—”

Steve doesn’t actually hear what else some people like, but he’s pretty sure he’s one of them, because the feeling of his fingers tightening around his nipples is so acute he barely knows whether it’s pleasure or pain. Whatever it is, it goes straight to his cock, and he’s close now, he’s so damn close he can taste it—

“Just like that,” someone is saying. “Oh god, Steve, god—”

There are fingers dragging over his abused nipples, hands kneading his ass and jerking his cock—too many hands, there must be someone else here, and so it doesn’t surprise him at all when—

 _“We’re going to try something,” Tony tells him._  

“That okay?” Iron Man asks. “You okay to try—”

“ _Anything_.”

_“Good,” Tony praises, “you’re so good, Steve, this is going to feel—”_

“—so good,” Iron Man promises. “Just—on the count of three, okay? I want you to pinch both your nipples as hard as you can, okay?”

“Nnngh,” Steve agrees.

“Ready?”

He jerks his head in a nod.

“One—”

 _“Two,” Tony murmurs in his ear_ as a hand slips behind his balls—

“Three—” and Steve squeezes hard just as something presses upwards into the stretch of skin behind his balls and his world falls apart in a burst of pleasure that sets the sky ablaze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next time: If you think we're stopping at one orgasm you have vastly underestimated the amount of smut this story contains.


	6. to take you in the sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covering kink meme parts 15 & 16

Someone is petting Steve’s forehead, pushing back sweat-dampened hair, soothing the skin with gentle strokes.

“To—” Steve starts to say, before he remembers. “Shellhead.”

“That’s me.”

The hand strokes him once more, lingers, and then, to Steve’s regret, falls away.

“I’ll be right back,” Iron Man says. Try as he might, Steve can read nothing at all in his tone.

Iron Man’s weight lifts from the bed. His feet, unweighted by armored boots, are light on the carpet. What a strange thing that is to think of, Iron Man’s feet—strange to think of him as the sort of person who might have have knobbly ankles, calloused heels, or hairy toes.

His footsteps recede. A door opens, closes, and Steve is alone with his fading afterglow.

The air in the room is much cooler than he remembers. He feels it keenly against his skin, against his sensitive, softening cock and against his stomach, still streaked with his own come. It feels wrong in some intimate, indefinable way—a presence spun out of absence, like the photonegative of touch.

He feels, for the first time, acutely aware of how exposed he is, how vulnerable. He wants to cover himself, but what would that do except spread his mess from his abdomen to the sheets? He should clean up before Iron Man gets back. Better that than wait here, needy and dependent like some—some child. There’s a box of tissues on his nightstand, but when he reaches out, he can’t find it. Iron Man must have moved it.

His lips thin and pull taut. Never mind. He’ll figure something else out.

Where is Iron Man, anyway? He said he’d be back, but why did he go? He hasn’t— God, he didn’t even finish, did he? Maybe that’s what he’s doing now—maybe he’s gone to get himself off in the bathroom, because Steve was too selfish, too wrapped up in his own gratification to even think—

Or worse, maybe Iron Man doesn’t need to finish. Maybe he wasn’t turned on at all. Maybe the whole thing was just an act, a circus staged for Steve’s benefit, and Steve can’t stand the thought of that sort of kindness—of Iron Man looking at him and deciding he was so desperate he needed the lie. Can’t stand the knowledge that Iron Man was right.

“I come bearing gifts,” Iron Man announces, bright and cheery. “Well, gift, anyway.”

His footsteps approach the bed, and stop.

Steve is frozen, propped up on his elbows, torso twisted towards the night stand, knees brought together to preserve what little dignity remains to him. His face—and most likely his neck and upper chest as well—are alight with shame.

“Steve?”

Steve forces himself to relax, even achieves something approaching a smile.

“Thanks,” he says, because what else is there to say? What can he offer now, except gratitude?

Iron Man is standing beside the bed. There’s a brief silence, when all Steve can hear is the mechanical rush of his breathing. Then:

“No.”

The word is light, almost pensive.

“No?” Steve repeats.

“No,” Iron Man says, more decisively now. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Whatever’s going on up here?” Knuckles graze Steve’s temple. “Not a fan. Didn’t order it, don’t want any, put it in a box and return to sender.”

“What are you talking about?” Steve asks, still anxious and a little annoyed, but somehow also near to laughing.

“You’re overthinking things again. I can tell. Emotionally constipated is not a good look on you, Winghead.” Iron Man lays a hand on Steve’s shoulder, and it feels so, so much better with real flesh than ever it did with iron and steel. “You had a nice time; I had a nice time. There’s nothing at all to regret or feel bad about, okay?”

“You had a nice time?” Steve echoes, unable to keep the plaintiveness from his voice.

Iron Man gives his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “The nicest.”

“But you didn’t even…” Steve jerks his head towards his own crotch.

Iron Man’s thumb is working its way along the ridge of Steve’s collarbone. “Wasn’t about me, big guy.”

Steve props himself a little higher in preparation for argument, dislodging Iron Man’s hand.

“That’s not—”

“Believe me, I plan to more than make it up to myself later.”

The dryness in his voice renders his meaning unmistakable. So Iron Man’s going to… And the way he said it, it sounded like he’ll be thinking about—

“You sure?” Steve asks.

“Oh, yeah. Gonna have myself a grand old time.”

Steve lets out a breath. That’s okay then. Isn’t it? That’s definitely— Yeah.

“Now would you please lie back down? I brought you a washcloth, and I’d like to actually use it before I rust.”

“The armor doesn’t rust,” Steve says, but he does as he’s bid.

“Oh, because you’d know so much about it.”

Then there’s something wet and warm on Steve’s stomach, and it feels good, oh, wow does it feel good, but—

He reaches out, catches Iron Man’s wrist.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says. “I mean, you don’t need to bother. I can…”

“Maybe I want to,” Iron Man counters, something in his voice that Steve can’t quite decipher. Then, before Steve can argue, he adds, softer now, “Let me do this for you. Please?”

Well. If Iron Man really wants to…

“Sure,” he decides, settling back against the pillows.

Iron Man breathes out a laugh and swipes a thumb across Steve’s lips, his other hand describing slow circles on Steve’s abdomen with the damp cloth.

“So generous.”

“You shouldn’t stick your fingers near my mouth if you’re going to patronize me,” Steve grumbles.

A scandalized gasp. Iron Man is such a ham. “Surely you’re not suggesting that Captain America bites?”

“Keep it up and you’ll find out.”

Iron Man clucks his tongue. “Promises, promises.”

The washcloth is slowly circling lower and lower. It’s the kind of sensation Steve could lose himself in, the rhythmic motion, the roughness of the cloth both stimulating and soothing against his sensitive skin. Iron Man’s spare hand comes up to stroke Steve’s cheek once more, little finger perilously close to the corner of his mouth. Steve turns his face into the touch.

Iron Man hums, a soft, throaty sound that sends tingles shivering up Steve’s spine.

There’s… a lot of tingling going on at the moment, to be perfectly honest—pinpricks of heat, sparks of sensation flaring where the cloth meets his skin. A hand curves over Steve’s thigh, urging his legs apart, and then the cloth is sliding down, over his balls and forward again, across his other thigh, wrapping carefully around his dick, tugging the foreskin back…

Steve gasps aloud as the cloth touches the head of his cock, abs contracting as something electric arcs through him. Iron Man pauses in his ministrations, but it’s too late. It’s like a switch has been flipped.

Behind the bandages, he screws his eyes shut.

_ No _ , he thinks,  _ not yet, not again _ .

“Wow,” Iron Man says, as Steve’s dick twitches and begins to harden in his hand. “Peak human refractory period too, huh? You really are the complete package.” His hand tightens and Steve swallows a groan. “I can see why you’ve been so distracted,” he says, accompanying the words with a teasing upstroke.

“ _ Stop _ ,” Steve blurts, and Iron Man’s hands fly away from him. His skin where the washcloth had been is damp and cold, but it doesn’t matter. The heat is inside him now, a rising glow. He feels like a furnace flaring to life.

“Sorry, God, I’m sorry. What did I— No, forget that: are you okay?”

“This isn’t normal.”

Even at the very worst of it, he’s always had at least fifteen minutes of rest between the waves, and even that hardly ever happens. This time it’s been… what? Five minutes? Less than?

“What’s not normal?”

“I never,” Steve gets out, “so quickly, I don’t— It’s too soon, I shouldn’t—”

He’s supposed to have a respite. He’s supposed to… not…  _ this _ . He’s never had another wave start this soon, never once had one triggered by something like touch. Never in this entire wretched cycle had one triggered without thinking about…

Oh no.

He flings an arm up across his eyes, but you can’t get blinder than blind, and anyway, the images are in his mind, no way to block that out. He grits his teeth. He needs Iron Man. If Iron Man will only touch him again maybe that’ll ground him.

He puts out a tentative hand, but no one takes it.

Iron Man is speaking fast and low, as if to himself.

“It’s me, isn’t it. Got to be. I thought it would help but it’s just making things worse. I should go, I should—”

“ _ No _ .” Steve hauls himself into a sitting position, one arm reaching out blindly in the direction of Iron Man’s voice, even as the other falls, inevitably, to his groin. “No, don’t—”

“If something’s changed in your cycle, there’s got to be a reason,” Iron Man says, with agonizing logic. “I’m the only thing that’s different.”

“Don’t leave,” Steve gasps. He’ll beg if he has to.

He’s borne this alone before, but alone isn't the same as being— as being  _ left _ …

“I— No, of course. Of course I’ll stay, if you want me to, I just…” Something seems to break in his voice. “Maybe I shouldn’t touch you. If that’s what’s causing the, uh. Irregularity.” A crackling breath. “You just… take care of yourself, okay? And I’ll keep you company. How does that sound?”

It sounds  _ awful _ . Steve’s hand on his cock is already halfway to maddening—painful on the over-sensitized skin, and yet somehow not anywhere close to enough. He wants Iron Man to touch him, wants it so keenly that the wanting feels like some kind of sixth sense, as if, deprived of sight, he’s had to remap the world in topographies of desire.

But he’s still rational enough to recognize the sense in Iron Man’s proposal, and to pick up on the subtle pleading in his voice.

He nods.

He doesn’t mean to speak, and indeed, the voice that issues from his lips sounds nothing like his own, thin and piteously strained.

“Just stay.”

* * *

Steve starts to wriggle towards the center of the bed, but Iron Man rests the back of his hand lightly on Steve’s shoulder, stilling him. His touch seems impossibly hot against Steve’s skin, almost blistering, like a brand.

Steve sucks in a breath, and Iron Man jerks his hand back as if he were the one who’d been burned.

“Sorry,” he says. “I forgot, I— I just meant there’s no need for you to move. Seeing that you’re blindfolded and all. I can go around the other side.

Steve nods, turning his head into his shoulder so his cheek brushes surreptitiously against the point of contact, seeking out the phantom touch.

He hears movement, before the mattresses depresses on the other side of the bed. He lets out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He can do this.

He starts to move his hand.

“You all right?” Iron Man’s voice is hesitant. “Only you’re… kind of making a face.”

Right. Because of course Iron Man can see his face. Iron Man can see all of him, and Steve has never in his life been rawer, never more exposed.

“Chafes,” he says, shortly.

“Oh.” Iron Man sounds like he’s wincing. “Yeah, I guess it must do. You don’t have any lube, or…?”

Steve shakes his head.

“Or lotion, lotion’s a classic.”

Steve raises his hand to his mouth and licks a broad stripe across his palm.

Iron Man inhales sharply. “Or that,” he says, sounding a little constricted. “That works.”

It feels better now, with his hand slicked. It adds an estrangement, an unfamiliarity to his own touch. Steve wills his body to relax, his mind to quiet—lets a handsome, blue-eyed face swim to the surface of his thoughts and feels a gulf, hot, dark, and hungry, begin to open beneath him.

Almost reflexively, his hand tightens around his cock, painfully hard, strangling the burgeoning pleasure he’d begun to find there.

What’s the matter with him? He’s done this before, hasn’t he? Dozens upon dozens of times within the past two weeks alone. Why should this time be so much different?

He swallows. When he speaks, his voice cracks a little.

“Could you—”

“Whatever you need,” Iron Man says, readily.

_ I need you _ , Steve doesn’t say.

He pushes down the first swellings of resentment, bitter and irrational. That Iron Man is here at all is already so much more than he could have hoped for.

“Could you talk to me?”

“I— Of course. Whatever you need. Like, um. Sexy talk? Or…”

“Anything. Just…”

_ Just don’t leave me alone. _

Steve swallows the words down, swallows it all down.  _ Pleasure _ , he reminds himself.  _ Just… just have to let go and all of this will be over. _

Mechanically, he works his hand up and down his cock. The friction filters through his mind like radio static, rough and blank and encompassing. An uneasy kind of pleasure, empty and wrong, like hearing static where there should be voices.

“So, uh. How about them Yankees?” Iron Man says.

Steve lets out a startled noise, somewhere between amusement and disgust.

“No, you’re right. Not the sexiest topic for a Dodgers fan, is it? Let’s see. Maybe… maybe picture the Dodgers moving back to Brooklyn. That should get you hot enough to trot, right? Think about, uh. Abbot’s? No, Ebbet’s. Ebbet’s Field open again and all the stands full. Bottom of the eighth, Brooklyn’s just hit a double. Half the stadium is cheering, the other half is cussing out the umpire, peanuts and crackerjacks flying everywhere you look—”

Steve groans and thumps his head back against the pillow.

Iron Man abruptly cuts himself short.

“Winghead?”

“Just,” Steve pants, “give me a moment.”

Iron Man can always make him laugh, but laughter isn’t what Steve needs right now, laughter is so very much  _ not _ what Steve needs right now that it almost registers as pain. He just needs a minute to refocus, get his breath back, think, think of—

God, yeah, of Tony, just for a moment, just to get him back on track. If it were Tony touching him like this… Take away the chafed-skin wrongness of it, keep only the pressure and the heat, add the little flick-of-the-wrist twist around the head, and—

Steve groans aloud.

_ “Just like that, Steve,” Tony breathes into his ear. “That’s right, you’re doing so well—” _

He thrusts up into his hand with a muffled cry, back arching, and that was okay, wasn’t it? It was good, even. This can be good, if he lets it, he just has to let this be good, as Tony’s whisper swirls out of the static, as the darkness presses in at the corners of his awareness and the ground beneath him trembles and buckles and begins to gape—

“Shellhead?” he says, a sad, needy little sound, almost a whimper.

For a moment, there’s nothing but silence and heat and the slow widening of the abyss.

Then Iron Man speaks.

“Do you have any idea,” he asks, voice rough, “how beautiful you are?”

Steve squirms beneath Iron Man’s imagined gaze, torn between relief and a kind of embarrassed pleasure.

“Do you think,” he asks, unable to help himself, “do you think Tony would like…?”

“If Mr. Stark were here,” Iron Man says, in tones of absolute conviction, “he’d be going out of his goddamned mind, seeing you.”

Steve shudders with arousal, but there’s a harshness to the words that doesn’t quite gel.

“I just want,” he mumbles into his own salt-slicked skin, “to be good for him.”

Steve hears Iron Man suck in a breath, and then the air is moving around him, he  _ knows _ Iron Man is reaching out. He strains towards a touch that never comes.

“Oh Cap,” Iron Man murmurs, with plaintive, impossible tenderness. “You would be. You’d be the best thing in the world.”

_ Please _ , Steve thinks, on something like a sob.

“How are you doing there? Okay?”

Steve shakes his head.

“If I’m distracting you, I can keep quiet. I know you need to think about—about him.”

“ _ No _ ,” Steve says, too quickly.

“No?”

“I mean, you’re right, I need to… focus, but—” Steve bites his tongue. Then: “I don’t want to lose myself. Your voice… It’s the only thing I can hold on to.”

“Well,” Iron Man says, dragging the word out. “Maybe… Would it help if you were the one talking to me? You could tell me what you’ve been thinking about. That way you wouldn’t get distracted, but it wouldn’t just be inside your head anymore.”

For a moment, Steve is overcome by a surge of gratitude so intense it almost takes his breath away. Then he realizes exactly what Iron Man’s suggestion would require him to do.

“You want me to  _ talk to you _ about my— my—”

“Hey, there’s absolutely no pressure,” Iron Man says soothingly. “No pressure, and no shame. They’re just fantasies, right? Everybody has fantasies. There’s nothing you can say that’s going to shock me, or that I’m going to judge you for. But if you’re not comfortable, that’s okay too. I just thought it might help.”

“I— That sounds like a… good idea,” Steve says, the words stilted. “I just have to think…” of a fantasy that he can survive voicing. “I, um. Okay. This— You really won’t… think anything of it?”

“Scout’s honor.”

“Well.” Steve can feel his cheeks flaming. “It’s kind of stupid, but… you remember when my suit got damaged? In the fight?”

“That’s… not exactly a rare occurrence,” Iron Man hedges.

“Last week. And you—”

Iron Man makes a soft noise of comprehension. “I took it to Mr. Stark for you, didn’t I? I remember now.”

Steve can’t help but shiver at the mention of Tony’s name, but he pushes gamely onwards.

“Right. Well, I was thinking about…” His tongue darts out to wet dry lips. “About what might have happened if I’d taken it myself. Uh…” He stops, momentarily at a loss for how to continue.

“I see. So, you’d show up to Mr. Stark’s room…” Iron Man prompts.

“Workshop.”

“Really?” An infinitesimal pause. “I mean, it’s your fantasy, of course, I just… I would have thought… He’s so… messy. In there.”

Steve squeezes his eyes shut behind the bandage, because can’t Iron Man see that that’s the point?

_ It’s the only place he feels real _ .

But apparently Iron Man can see.

“Unless you like that,” he says. Then, a little hesitantly: “You want him to mess you up a little?”

Steve gasps, and feels himself, impossibly, harden further in his hand.

“But I’m getting ahead of things,” Iron Man says. “We’d gotten to the workshop.”

Steve clears his throat. “Tony’s busy. Working on some kind of, uh. Gizmo.”

“He does that,” Iron Man agrees, faintly amused.

Steve’s cheeks heat. “He has me show myself in,” he continues, stubbornly. “I tell him about my suit and he says I should leave it. On the b-bench. But I forgot to… I’m still wearing…”

Iron Man clicks his tongue in realization. “You’re still wearing the costume, of course. And I bet you forgot to bring a change of clothes, didn’t you?”

Steve exhales a breath of mingled gratitude and mortification. “Yeah.”

“Does Mr. Stark know?” Iron Man’s tone might have been kind, if not for a low, thrumming intensity that underlies the words. “What he’s asking you to do?”

“He hasn’t looked,” Steve confesses, worrying at his bottom lip with his teeth. “He’s too—too busy.”

“With the gizmo.”

Steve nods.

“Is it shiny, the gizmo? Reflective?”

What on earth does that have to do with anything?

“I’m just asking because I thought— Maybe if it’s shiny, he can still see. Even if he’s not looking directly at you, he might still be… watching.”

“Oh,” Steve breathes, overtaken by the possibility. “ _ Oh,  _ yeah, he— He—”

“Yeah? Then what?”

Steve gives his head a little shake to clear it. “I— I take off my mail and put it on the bench. And, uh. And then…”

“…and then?” Iron Man prompts after a moment.

Steve ducks his head. This is perhaps the most embarrassing part of the fantasy. It seems so absurd, now he comes to say it aloud, so contrived, and yet, Iron Man hasn’t been laughing at him so far.

“He says he’s got an upgrade. For my—” and it’s so stupid, god it’s so stupid, but he’s started this, hasn’t he? he can’t stop  _ now _ “—my pants. So I…”

Iron Man lets out a rush of breath. “So you take them off,” he says, such perfect understanding in his voice that Steve is almost squirming with it. “What else could you do? You take them off, and you probably fold them neatly too. So thoughtful— _ considerate _ .”

“Yes.”

“And you have to take the boots off first, don’t you? To take off the pants. And then it would just be silly, wouldn’t it, to keep wearing the gloves, so you take those off too—”

“ _ Yes _ .”

“And there you are, standing in Mr. Stark’s workshop in nothing but your underwear, and there he is, tinkering with his gizmo… What happens then?”

“I—” Steve’s voice is low and rasping. “He turns.”

“He sees you?”

Steve nods.

“What does he see, when he looks at you?”

Steve bites down on his lip, tightening his grip around himself. “He—”

“Steve? What does he see?”

Steve swallows. “ _ Everything _ .”

“ _ Yes _ .” There’s something almost savage in Iron Man’s answer, in its speed and sandpaper sibilance. “Of course he does. Stripped bare like that—how could you possible hide it?”

“I c-couldn’t. I can’t,  _ unh _ —” Steve scrabbles at the sheets with his free hand.

“What does he do? When he sees you? When he sees everything?”

Steve bites back an oath, thrusting upward into his fist, and god, but it’s still nowhere near  _ enough _ —

Something dark and heated is curling around Iron Man’s words like wood smoke.

“Does he fall to his knees?”

Steve releases the sheet and drags his fingernails up the outside of his thigh, scoring four bright lines of pain. Anything,  _ anything _ to feel, to make the fever in his body match the fever in his mind.

He isn’t aware of speaking the word at all.

_ “Please.” _

Iron Man swears.

“Is this helping? Are you—is it getting any better?”

There’s an edge of urgency to his tone, and Steve goes almost dizzy with the possibilities implied there.

“No. No, it’s— No.” He clenches his teeth against the impulse to beg. Iron Man said he shouldn’t touch Steve, and Steve isn’t so far gone that he’ll push his friend into doing anything he’s not comfortable with.

But Iron Man knows—Iron Man understands, and Steve doesn’t have to ask.

“Okay. Okay, I can— I’m going to help you,” he says, and Steve thinks he could cry from the sheer relief of it. “But I’m not going to be able to talk for a while. If you want me to stop, for any reason, just say. And if you need to ask me anything, it’s one tap for yes, two taps for no, okay?”

“Are you sure?” Steve forces himself to ask.

Iron Man swears again, low and filthy. “Winghead, if I don’t get my hands on you in the next minute I think one of us might spontaneously combust. Yes. Yes, I’m sure, if you are.”

Yes.  _ God _ yes.

He must manage to say that out loud, because Iron Man gives a little gasping laugh. Then:

“Okay,” he says, and takes an audible breath. “And please, if you could— If you could try not to touch my face, I’d really… Yeah.”

There are a few mechanical clicks, like something’s being unlatched, followed by a heavy clunk in the vicinity of the nightstand.

More shifting on the mattress. Two hands come to rest atop Steve’s bent knees, rubbing almost absently at the flesh there.

Steve hears a breath not his own—a breath with no static to it, and it hits him that for the very first time, he and Iron Man are face to face.

The thought sparks something within him. He doesn’t quite know what, but he can feel it happen.

He opens his mouth to say… he scarcely knows what.

He never gets the chance to find out.

The hands on his knees slide downwards, hooking around his thighs, and the next minute there’s a hot, wet mouth closing over his cock, and then there are no words at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next time: All of the blow jobs.


	7. to promised lands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covering kink meme parts 17 & 18
> 
> thanks to the wonderful and many-talented Serinah for the beta!

Iron Man gives head like he’s starving for it, and somehow, at the same time, trying to savor every moment of it. Like a condemned prisoner eating his last meal, Iron Man licks and sucks and swallows Steve down and down until Steve can feel Iron Man’s throat constricting around his cock.

All due respect to Martine the Marseillaise prostitute and her clever tongue, it’s like nothing Steve has ever felt.

The wetness and the warmth and the pressure, the hot vacuum of Iron Man’s mouth, the teasing flick of his tongue against the underside of Steve’s head… Steve doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe the way it feels, as if Iron Man is teaching him a whole new language of sensation.

He’s not going to last.

He never wants it to end.

He tries to think of Tony, more out of reflex than anything else—tries to imagine another mouth, sharp-edged, mobile and generous, and feels, just for a moment, the roughness of a mustache brush against the base of his cock. But then the feeling is gone and the fantasy is sliding away from him. His mind is all slippery heat, and offers no traction.

Steve stops trying to think about Tony.

Steve stops thinking about much of anything at all.

All the world narrows down to a single, molten point, like the big bang in reverse. Everything rushes and swirls and contracts around the place where Iron Man’s mouth meets his skin.

Someone is whimpering, desperate little noises of pleasure and need. There are words mixed in among the whimpering. _Please,_ and _don’t stop,_ and _please_ again. Somewhere beneath the layers of heat and noise, Steve is surprised to realize the sounds are coming from his own mouth. He hardly even knows what they mean, only that he can’t stop making them. It’s part compulsion, part imperative. _Please,_ he says, _please,_ because the possibility that this might stop is simply too awful to bear.

Iron Man presses tender, open-mouthed kisses up the length of Steve’s shaft, sucks one of Steve’s balls into his mouth and rolls it gently around like wine across the tongue as Steve thrashes and moans and scrabbles at sheets—

_Please, please._

Iron Man swallows him down again.

His hips are moving of their own accord, bucking upward, driving him further and further into Iron Man’s mouth, and that’s—that’s wrong he knows, he shouldn’t— He tries to still himself, but two hands slide beneath his ass, lifting it upwards, an invitation.

“Y-you,” Steve gets out, choking on want and disbelief, “you want me to—”

One firm tap against the side of his ass.

One tap is… is…

 _Yes,_ Steve remembers, and _“yes”_ hissing through his clenched teeth, _“yes”_ torn like a sob from his throat as he thrusts upward into Iron Man’s waiting mouth.

Iron Man makes a glad sound deep in his throat and sucks hard and determined, hard enough to pull Steve’s climax right out of him. He doesn’t even have time for a warning before he’s coming in hot pulses down Iron Man’s throat.

Things go fuzzy for a little while after that.

He comes back to himself when the last of the aftershocks are dying away. Steve is lying wrecked and boneless on the bed, chest heaving, skin prickling with sweat. “That was…” he begins, and stops, at a loss for words.

A single tap.

Steve smiles, helplessly, and rolls his head to one side. “Sorry I didn’t… didn’t warn you. I should’ve… I’m sorry.”

Iron Man taps twice, far more decisively than before— _No_ —and smacks his lips. The sound, in context, is so obscene that it makes Steve laugh and shudder and blush all at once.

“Yeah?”

One tap.

“Can I—” Steve hesitates, swallows. “Can I kiss you?”

He isn’t sure quite where the desire comes from, a desire that is not like the desire he’s known, something fierce and hot and dreadful, but a quiet, gentle ache. He wants the intimacy of it, two bodies aligned, pressing closer, the soft tangle of limbs and tongues and lips. The thought occurs to him that if he kisses Iron Man, he’ll be able to taste himself in Iron Man’s mouth, and that thought does send a pulse of heat through him, but that’s not what this is about. He can’t even say, in this limp, floating state of post-coital bliss, that he wants to kiss Tony.

He just wants to be kissed.

He realizes Iron Man has yet to respond.

“Shellhead?”

Something comes to rest on Steve’s hip for a moment. He feels sweat-dampened skin and a thick sweep of hair—Iron Man’s forehead.

Iron Man pulls away again and taps Steve twice on the flank.

“Oh,” Steve says, feeling vaguely ashamed. “That’s right. No touching your face, you said. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

Fingers stroke over the place where Iron Man had tapped out his refusal, soothing Steve, gentling him. Iron Man shifts his weight once more and a hand presses lightly against Steve’s chest, holding him down to the mattress.

 _Wait,_ Steve translates, as the hand withdraws.

Steve hears a loud, almost cartoonish smooching sound, and then Iron Man is leaning over him and pressing a callused palm to Steve’s cheek. Steve can feel the damp imprint of Iron Man’s lips against his skin. He presses his hand over Iron Man’s, holding it in place as he turns his head into the touch, fitting his own lips over the place on Iron Man’s palm where the traces of his kiss still linger.

Iron Man makes a soft, throaty sound and his hand comes up to push Steve’s hair back from his eyes.

“I don’t know what that noise means,” Steve confesses hazily.

Iron Man clucks his tongue and trails his hand down Steve’s neck and across his chest, seeming to linger just for a moment over Steve’s left pectoral. Then he begins to pull away.

“Oh,” Steve says around a pang of loss, “no, hey, you don’t have to—” He reaches out for Iron Man’s shoulder but, blind as he is, completely misjudges the distance and the resulting force of his own movement. Iron Man lets out an _oof_ of surprise as Steve knocks away his supporting arm and he collapses forward onto Steve’s chest.

Steve knew, vaguely, that Iron Man was still wearing his chest plate, but knowing is different from feeling the evidence cold against his skin. Iron Man must have been very careful so far to position himself so that Steve couldn’t feel it. The realization strikes Steve as sad in a way he can’t quite define.

That sadness is swept away as Steve realizes the other thing Iron Man has been trying to keep Steve from feeling, namely, the fact that he’s still wearing underwear, and that underneath it, he’s fully hard and leaking. Steve can feel the evidence pressed against his thigh.

He shifts his leg, rubbing gently upward and Iron Man sucks in a breath.

“Hey there,” Steve says, and smiles. He still feels good—he still feels so very good, and he wants to make Iron Man feel good too. “Maybe I can help you with that?”

Iron Man is frozen in place, breathing quick and shallow.

Steve reaches up, more carefully now, aiming once more for Iron Man’s shoulder, but Iron Man startles and rolls off of him. The mattress shifts wildly under his weight. There’s a clattering from the nightstand, and then something heavy and metallic falls to the floor.

Steve hears a curse, hastily muffled, before Iron Man’s weight lifts from the bed entirely.

“Shellhead?”

Steve props himself up on his elbows, listening to the sound of footsteps, the scrape of something heavy being lifted from the floor, and the click of something latching into his face.

“Sorry,” Iron Man says, tinny through the modulator, and a little rougher than Steve is used to hearing.

It’s a relief, undeniably, to hear his friend speak again, but Steve can’t help but feel a little pang of regret. The very sound of Iron Man’s voice, so familiar in all of its mechanized inhumanity, suddenly seems emblematic of the distance between them, and Steve knows it’s wrong—knows that the Avengers are pledged to respect each other’s needs for privacy, but he can’t help but think… Iron Man already knows the worst of _Steve’s_ secrets.

“Sorry, I just meant you don’t have to worry about… that. Me. I’m here for you. My dick is…” Iron Man blows out a breath, as if casting around for a phrase. “…surplus to requirements.”

Steve smiles, a little reluctantly, at the phrasing. “I’m not worried,” he says, which is almost true, “and it’s not about what’s required. I just… want to.”

“You want to?” Iron Man echoes. He sounds faintly incredulous, and at the same time—and this can’t be right, but—at the same time, almost wistful.

“You’ve done a lot for me. I’d like to do something for you. I think I’d enjoy that,” Steve adds, cutting off Iron Man’s half-formed protests. “I think you would too.” He licks his lips in what he hopes comes across as invitation rather than nerves. “If you don’t want to, that’s fine, but it’s something I’d really… Yeah.”

“It’s not a question of me not wanting to,” Iron Man says, low and fervent, “I want to, I just— Are you sure?”

Behind the blindfold, Steve rolls his eyes.

“Shellhead,” he says, with a familiar feeling of amused exasperation. “Will you please get over here and let me suck your dick?”

Iron Man gives a little gasp. “That’s cheating,” he says. “Using the Captain America voice like that.”

“It’s the only voice I’ve got.”

“That’s not even a little bit— Hey!”

This as Steve makes a kind of lunge in the direction of Iron Man’s voice, nearing falling off the bed in the process.

“You’re going to break something, carrying on like that,” Iron Man scolds.

“If you’d just come back here, it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“A good point, well made,” Iron Man concedes. There’s a pause. When he speaks next, his voice is low, as if he’s speaking to himself. “Christ, I shouldn’t—” He breaks off abruptly. Then: “You really want this?”

Something in his voice makes Steve pause to really consider the question.

He thinks about getting his friend off, returning the favor—giving Iron Man back some small fraction of what he’s given to Steve. It makes him feel warm in a pleasant, happy way. Then he thinks of how he’d do it—of falling to his knees, breathing in the scent of musk, of the taste of salt and a heavy weight on his tongue… Fragments of old fantasies flash across his mind, like a cut-up film reel, _Tony backed up against the wall outside a bar, sprawled across one of the benches in his workshop, arching back against the kitchen counter, head flung back, fingers knotting in Steve’s hair, calling out to God, calling out Steve’s name as if the two were one and the same—_

Steve’s cheeks are hot. He licks his lips again, feels saliva beginning to pool beneath his tongue.

“Yeah,” he says. “I really do.”

Iron Man clears his throat.

“Well, then. Guess I should take my pants off.”

Steve smiles. “Sounds like a good start.”

They wind up, despite Iron Man’s initial protests— _“That can’t be comfortable for you, come on”_ —with Iron Man sitting on the edge of the bed and Steve kneeling between his splayed legs.

Steve slides his hands up Iron Man’s thighs, enjoying Iron Man’s intake of breath. Iron Man’s legs are hairier than Steve’s own. He decides he likes that. Tony probably has a lot of body hair too, given his Italian heritage.

He drags his lips in his fingers’ wake, up the inside of Iron Man’s thigh to the thatch of wiry hair where Iron Man’s leg meets his body.

Iron Man sucks in a breath.

Yeah.

Yeah, Steve likes that a lot.

He sits back a little on his heels.

“This might be a good time to mention I’ve never done this before,” he says, keeping his voice casual. “But I’m a very quick learner,” he adds, not fast enough to preempt Iron Man’s little noise of his distress. Only Steve’s anchoring hand on his thigh keeps him from drawing back.

“Oh, hell. I didn’t realize. You— You really don’t have to do this, you know. You can back out any time, no harm no foul—”

“Nah,” Steve says. “I’m committed now.” He rubs Iron Man’s leg reassuringly with his thumb and tilts his head back so Iron Man can see his smile. “Same goes for you, you know. No harm, no foul.”

Iron Man exhales on a laugh. “Do your worst.”

“You,” Steve promises, “get my very best.”

Steve feels his way along Iron Man’s thighs again until he comes to his cock. He takes it in hand, enjoying the heft of it. He enjoys even more the way Iron Man jumps at his touch. When he fits his lips over the head, Iron Man swears aloud.

Steve smiles. This is going to be good.

Sucking Iron Man’s cock is both everything and nothing like Steve imagined it.

…not that he’d imagined sucking _Iron Man’s_ cock, of course, but the principle is the same.

It’s messy, not messy in the filthy, deliberate way of his fantasies— _Tony yanking Steve’s head back, painting Steve’s body with his release_ —but in an awkward, uncoordinated kind of way. More than once, when Steve angles his head wrong, Iron Man’s cock slips from his mouth, dragging wet trails across his cheek and chin, but from the sound of it, Iron Man doesn’t seem to mind.

Iron Man doesn’t seem to mind much of anything at all, judging by the way he mutters litanies of praise and prayers beneath his breath—doesn’t mind Steve’s inexperience, doesn’t mind his blindfold-induced discoordination.

“Oh god, you’re a natural at this, _god_ that’s good, you’re so good at this, Steve, _Christ,_ so gorgeous and so good, how is this even happening, can barely believe I’m awake that’s how good you are, just like that, so gorgeous, you’re like a dream—”

Steve feels his body begin to respond, feels the flames of arousal rekindle, feels his dick begin to fill, but it’s not like it was before, not something maddening, not an affliction, just another part of the totality of the experience—the smoothness of Iron Man’s skin, the fullness in his mouth, the taste of salt on his tongue.

He reaches down to take himself in hand, and that feels right, that feels good, to be touching himself with Tony’s—no, not Tony’s, Iron Man’s—with Iron Man’s cock in his mouth.

Iron Man groans. “You’re not— You _are,_ you’re getting off on— Oh, Jesus, Steve, I’m not going to last.”

Steve hums his approval and begins to suck more vigorously, bobbing his head in time with his hand on his cock.

“He’d love this, you know?” Iron Man says abruptly. “Mr. Stark.”

The shock of the name sends arousal zinging down Steve’s spine and he whines around Iron Man’s cock.

“You’re so good, Steve, Christ, better than anything he’s ever had. Better than anything he’s ever dreamed, you—”

Steve makes a soft protesting noise, but Iron Man’s voice brooks no argument.

“I know,” he says. “What’d I tell you? Best thing in the whole damn world.”

Behind the blindfold, Steve screws his eyes shut.

For a moment, there’s nothing but the sound of flesh moving over flesh, fast and slick.

When Iron Man speaks again, his voice is both quieter and much closer than before, and Steve realizes he must be bending down, leaning over as if to impart a secret.

“You have no idea, do you, what you look like, doing that? You look like— _gunh_ —you look like sin, or— _Jesus,_ yeah, just like that—or whatever’s the opposite of that.” A strange, twisty laugh. Then, very softly: “You look like my unjust reward.”

Something in the way he says it makes Steve pull back long enough to argue. “Just reward, surely.”

There’s bitterness to Iron Man’s voice this time, the way it’s burned black at the edges. “Oh, darling,” he says, stroking a hand across Steve’s hair, “you have no idea.”

* * *

Steve is the first to come, shuddering and shaking into his own grip.

“Oh, god,” Iron Man gasps out. “Did you just…? I don’t think I can— I’m gonna—”

He tries to pull back, but Steve follows the motion, attempting to convey, as eloquently as he can with his mouth full of cock, that Iron Man is welcome to come down his throat—that he wants it, even.

There follows a very brief tug-of-war over Iron Man’s dick, which ends with Iron Man pulling out of Steve’s mouth just as he comes, liberally splattering Steve’s face, chest, and, in all likelihood, the carpet beneath him with warm ejaculate.

Iron Man swears. “I’m so sorry,” he says, “I swear I didn’t mean to—”

Steve starts to laugh.

“It’s not— I’m not joking _._ I shouldn’t have— I would never—”

“I’m just imagining,” Steve gets out between chuckles, “your face.”

“You don’t even know what my face looks like,” Iron Man says, sounding a little disgruntled.

“I bet I can guess its expression though.” Steve pulls an expression of ludicrous shock and dismay, nostrils flaring, mouth open with the corners downturned.

“Stop that,” Iron Man says, nudging him in the chest with an outstretched toe. “I’m trying to apologize here—”

“You’re just mad because I’m right.”

“Noo,” Iron Man says, drawing out the word. “I’m just embarrassed for you. Because of how wrong you are.” He’s attempting to sound stern, but Steve is certain he can hear a smile lurking at the edges. “It’s everywhere,” he adds, with a soft sound of dismay. “All over the blindfold—you’ll have to take that off, the last thing you want is that getting in your eyes—”

He cuts off on an indrawn breath as Steve swipes a finger through the mess on his cheeks and brings it to his mouth.

It tastes… pretty good, actually. Salty, and a little bit hearty.

He says as much.

“I— You—” Iron Man stammers. “Jesus, Cap. Let’s just get you to the bathroom and get you cleaned off before you give me a heart attack.”

Steve gets obligingly to his feet, not quite able to resist licking his lips as noisily as possible for the pleasure of hearing the stutter in Iron Man’s breath.

“You’ll be the death of me yet,” he mutters. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Steve lets Iron Man lead him into the bathroom. He lets him hand him a washcloth and untie the knot on the bandage around his head.

“I’m just tucking the ends in,” Iron Man tells him. “But it should all come off easily as soon as you tug one loose.”

Steve nods indulgently, because he’s pretty sure he could have figured it out himself, but it kind of seems like Iron Man needs this. Anyway, it’s kind of nice to be taken care of, even if he doesn’t need it.

Iron Man’s hand brushes his arm, and Steve resists the urge to catch it and raise it to his lips. That would probably be too much. Now that they’re not… anymore.

Definitely too much.

Yeah.

“I’m going to put the armor back on,” Iron Man says, “so just knock on the door before you come out, okay?”

“You’re not going to clean up?” Steve asks, surprised. “You can’t tell me you’ll be comfortable like that.”

“Oh, well.” Steve can hear Iron Man shift his weight from one foot to another and then back again. “I can always clean up when I get back to my room.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Steve says. “Just hang on a moment.”

He reaches forward for where he’s pretty sure the sink is, turns on the tap, and sticks the washcloth underneath.

“Oh,” Iron Man says, “that’s not…”

“Take this,” Steve says, in a tone that brooks no argument, and hands him the damp washcloth, “and give me the spare.”

A moment’s hesitation.

The washcloth is lifted from his hands, and another is laid in its place.

“You’re the boss,” Iron Man says.

He hears Iron Man’s footsteps retreating. He hears the door close, hears the click of the latch.

Once he’s unwrapped the bandages and carefully daubed off his face, he opens his eyes and examines himself in the mirror.

His face is flushed, though whether from the heat of the washcloth or something else he can’t tell. His eyes are very bright. His lips are bruised with color, red and a little bit swollen, and his hair is sticking up at odd angles. He looks thoroughly debauched.

He decides that he likes it.

He feels good, really, emphatically _good,_ in a way he hasn’t felt in a very long time. Content and energized all at once. He bounces a little on the balls of his feet and smiles at his reflection, then knocks on the bathroom door.

“You can come out,” Iron Man says.

Steve has already begun to turn the doorknob when it occurs to him that he’s still naked. He wraps a towel around his hips, opens the door, and steps into the room beyond.

Iron Man is standing in the middle of Steve’s bedroom, fully dressed in his metal suit and looking a little awkward. Steve feels a small pang of… sorrow? disappointment? loss? at the sight of him armored once more. Untouchable.

Whatever the feeling is, it is rapidly eclipsed by gladness. Steve feels his cheeks stretch and his eyes crinkle in a beaming smile.

“Hey, Shellhead,” he says. “Nice to see you.”

Iron Man exhales on a laugh. “Right back atcha, buddy. Gotta say, I missed those baby blues.”

Steve wrinkles his nose. “Trying to butter me up?”

“You? Never.” Iron Man shifts his weight, folds and unfolds his arms before putting them behind his back. “So, uh. How are you doing?”

“I’m doing good,” Steve tells him. “Really, really good. Better than I’ve felt in… well. A while, anyway.” He clears his throat. “I… just wanted to say I really appreciate—”

“Don’t mention it,” Iron Man says hastily. “It was—”

“Don’t say ‘it was nothing,’” Steve interjects. “It wasn’t. It was… Well, it meant a lot to me, Shellhead, and I think it really helped.”

“Helped,” Iron Man echoes. “Sure.”

“It wasn’t nothing,” Steve says, firmly.

There’s a pause.

“Yeah,” Iron Man says. “Yeah, okay.”

There’s a slight awkwardness—a tension that’s descended on the room and Steve isn’t sure where it came from.

“Uh,” Iron Man says. “There anything else you…?”

“Not for the moment. I’ve still got some bagels to eat though, if you want to help, or… no, stupid of me—you can’t really eat bagels, can you?”

“Not as such,” Iron Man says. “I’ve actually got some things I should really be…”

“Of course.” Steve gives Iron Man a reassuring smile. “This probably wasn’t how you planned to spend your morning, huh?”

“Hah. Yeah, it… Anyway… Listen, if you need anything, anything at all, just call me, okay?”

“Sure.”

“I mean it. The minute you need something, give me a ring.”

“Absolutely,” Steve lies.

“Well,” Iron Man says. “Be seeing you, then.”

“Don’t be a stranger.”

Iron Man barks out a laugh. “Right.”

And then the door is shutting behind him and Steve is alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time, in another thrilling installment of _Fake Science and Pining Morons_ , Steve feels great and everything is fine. (:
> 
> Also, jsyk this coming update is the last batch of completely prewritten material, so updates after that will be a bit more sporadic.


	8. to show you every one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covering kink meme parts 19-21

The rest of Steve’s morning is… good.

Really good, actually.

A vague sense of awkwardness lingers in the wake of Iron Man’s departure, but it soon dissipates in the face of Steve’s overwhelming sense of wellbeing. Physical, mental—it’s like the high at the end of a really satisfying workout, only… well, _better_ than that. Steve can’t really put it into words, even to himself, but then, there isn’t really a need to, is there? When he can just… feel it.

He finishes cleaning up his and Iron Man’s mess, bundling the sheets into the hamper and sponging up the few traces of come left of the floor—gives himself a more thorough wipe-down with the washcloth, and then sits down to finally finish drawing up that training regimen, the one he’d mentioned to Iron Man—was it really only two weeks ago?

That done, he stretches and debates the merits of going down to the gym. He wants—god, he feels good—wants to do… _something_ with all of this wellness that’s inside him—to think, to make, to _move_. He decides in the end that the risk of running into one of the other Avengers at the gym is too high, but passes a few pleasant, mindless hours doing calisthenics on his floor instead. It’s not easy for him to get a good workout with bodyweight exercises alone, but sheer persistence allows him to work up a decent sweat.

Time for a shower.

The water feels different today, his skin still strangely sensitized. The sheer amount of information… it’s as if he’s individually aware of each point where the water touches his skin. It’s a little overwhelming, but soothing, too, the way that white noise is soothing. It’s a shame he hadn’t thought of a shower earlier; he could have asked Iron Man to join him.

Not that he thinks Iron Man would have said yes, between his desire for secrecy—Steve can’t say he finds the idea of being blindfolded in the shower particularly pleasant—and the armor he refused to—couldn’t?—remove.

Probably not couldn’t. Iron Man must be able to shower somehow. He certainly didn’t smell like someone for whom hygiene was an issue. He smelled… nice. Really nice, actually, now Steve comes to think of it.

He feels heat shimmering just beneath his surface, a heat that has nothing to do with the steam curling and coalescing in the air around him, and everything to do with the memory of the sharp, bright tone of metal, the tang of sweat. The darker undertone of musk.

It reminds him of Tony—the heat swells, pushing outwards at the boundaries of his skin, which seems suddenly pressurized, taut, vulnerable to rupture—yes, of Tony, the way the smell of metal clings to him, even outside the shop—as if he carries his work with him always, like something in the blood—

_(in the blood)_

He curls a hand around his hardening cock, shielding it from the warmth and teasing pressure of the water, but he can’t quite resist a squeeze—a single upstroke—

The tiled walls take his groan and echo it back to him, full and reverberant, shuddering down to the bone.

He moves his hand again, lets his mind drift…

_He’s in standing beneath the flow of another shower, in one of the bathrooms attached to the gym, hosing himself down after a nice, heavy workout. There’s a sound from behind him. He turns; sees Tony there in the doorway, dressed in one of those obscenely expensive suits and eying Steve the way a hungry man might regard a feast._

_“Like what you see?” Steve asks, because in his fantasy there’s no fear—no shame._

_Tony’s smile is slow as molasses and twice as dark. His voice is husky. “Like it better if I could touch.”_

_“What’s stopping you?”_

_Tony’s eyes flick downwards, and then back again at Steve. “Hate to ruin the suit.” His tongue flickers for a moment between his teeth. There’s something sly, almost conspiratorial, in his smile now. They both know what this is about, and it’s got nothing to do with saving Tony a trip to the drycleaners. “Why don’t you keep up the good work? I’ll just stand here and… appreciate.”_

Steve’s eyes are closed now as he imagines _the weight of Tony’s gaze, dragging over him like fingers over skin_ —imagines _Tony’s lips, bitten red, wet by his tongue as Steve lathers his chest in slow, deliberate circles, trailing foam down his abdomen. He’s touching himself now, in his fantasy_ as in life, working his hand _up and down, firm but not too fast, and he can hear, even over the sound of the water, the hitch in Tony’s breathing as he flicks a thumb over the head—hears the rapid stutter of Tony’s heart—_

_What would it take, to get him to put sartorial considerations aside and join Steve under the water? How much teasing could Tony take before he broke?_

Steve thinks of that, of _Tony before him, gasping beneath his touch, hair dripping into his eyes, Italian leather shoes squelching and his gorgeous suit a stained and sopping ruin as he bucks into Steve’s hand—all of him a ruin and all for Steve_ —

It’s the easiest orgasm he’s had in days.

Steve exhales. Smiles. Rests his shoulders against the wall of the shower.

He’d forgotten what it was like, for pleasure to be… well, something _pleasant_. Something not a burden.

Forgotten—if he’d ever known it in the first place.

He bats the thought aside. It has no place here, troubling the easy warmth of his afterglow. He takes a few deep breaths, and reaches once again for the soap.

The glow has faded a little bit by the time he’s washed, toweled, and dressed. Stepping back into the bedroom, he glances at the clock. A quarter past two.

The hours of the day stretch long and empty before him.

Well.

Not a problem.

He’ll just have to find something to keep him occupied, that’s all. Like…

Like reading. That’s something people do to pass the time, isn’t it?

He grabs his book off the nightstand, plunks himself down in a chair.

The book is one Iron Man had lent him, a somewhat irreverent retelling of Arthurian legend. From the printing date and battered state of the spine, Steve has surmised that it’s a childhood copy, much reread, and is secretly a little touched by the gesture. Iron Man shares so little of his life outside the suit. Steve thinks of him now as a young boy, curled up in bed with his book, and laughs out loud as he realizes he’s picturing this younger version of his friend complete with a miniaturized helmet and chest plate.

Iron Man had, in fact, given him the copy months before, when they were only just barely starting to become friends. Steve had been confused by the gift at the time—even a little suspicious, as he so often was in those early days. For Iron Man to lend him a book whose first volume had been published in the 1930s—did he think Steve couldn’t handle anything more modern? Was the title— _The Once and Future King_ —some sort of oblique reference to Steve himself? When a quick flip-through revealed that one of the main characters was actually living backwards in time, Steve had set the book aside and hadn’t looked at it again for months, certain it was some sort of joke—well meant, perhaps, but ultimately tasteless.

But the better he’d come to know his teammate, the less likely it seemed that Iron Man could’ve given him a gift in mockery, however friendly the intent. Shellhead was, with the possible exception of his employer, the most considerate man Steve had met in this era—in any era. He’d picked the book up again one restless night a few weeks back and found himself, to his surprise, charmed by the tales of the young Arthur and his eccentric tutor. He could identify with the story of a boy underestimated and overlooked; even the cynicism that had struck him before had a kindness and good humor behind it that he’d missed on the first read. He can understand now why Iron Man would like it—that mixture of the noble and the mundane, all bound together with a twist of whimsy… A realist and a romantic all rolled into one, that’s his Shellhead.

He’d just finished the first section when the cycle hit and put all thoughts of light entertainment out of his mind.

Now, he rolls his shoulders back as he settles more comfortably into the chair, feeling a hum of pleasurable anticipation.

Yet, try as he might, he can’t quite get into the story the way he’d expected. The newest section opens after a significant time skip, centering around characters not previously introduced, and maybe Steve is taking things a little too personally, but he finds himself resenting the gap, that tacit expectation of readjustment.

He pushes on, more out of stubbornness than anything else. It’s slow going. The new book is peppered with unsubtle allegory and references to the second world war—it might almost have been designed to put his back up. But more than anything, he dislikes the changes wrought in the book’s protagonist. The boy Steve had felt for is gone, replaced by a young king, complacent, blithely ignorant, interested only in those of his responsibilities that lay on the battlefield. Steve shifts in his chair, troubled by a persistent but amorphous itch. As if he’d ever, even for a moment, been allowed to lay his responsibilities aside. As if he’d ever really allowed himself to _want_ to…

And okay, so maybe he’s being a little overcritical. More critical than he’d normally be, at any rate, but why should that be, when he’s been feeling so good? Really, really good—the thought is almost plaintive—centered and healthy and—

And there’s that itch again. One of the muscles in his thigh jerks and spasms.

He tosses the book onto a side table and rakes his fingers through his hair. Enough reading for now. He’ll just find something else to pass the time. Something like…

What?

He could work out more, he supposes, but the thought of more of those endless, dreary exercises, barely even effectual… He could watch a movie, or—or listen to another of those radio things Tony had told him about—

Hastily, he jerks his mind away from the thought of Tony, but… radio. He could do that. He used to like listening to the radio.

Another twitch deep in the muscle, followed by a slow, squirming crawl.

The restlessness is on him again, the need for activity. He’s so tired of feeling useless, of sitting around and letting things happen, even when those things are movies or radio pods. He looks at the door and feels a tick in his jaw—glances over toward the desk, half hoping for some sort of work to just materialize, when his eye falls on the sketchbook, still pristine and untouched inside its vacuum-sealed packaging. Yet another gift from Tony, not that Tony and his gifts are something Steve really wants to be— Anyway.

A sketchbook and a package of soft-leaded pencils.

There’s something he could do.

God, when was the last time he’d picked up a pencil? Could it really have been all the way back before Rebirth? He can’t remember drawing after that, although he knows he’d thought about it sometimes, in the very worst nights of the war—retiring the shield, going back to art school, when everything was over and Captain America was no longer needed.

A fantasy, nothing more.

Drawing was always his escape. Escape was something you were allowed when you were 4-F and not good for much more than dreaming. It’s not something you get when you’re a hero. A symbol. That never stops.

Except that it’s stopped now, hasn’t it? He’s hardly a hero, benched as he is—gathering dust, irrelevant, _useless_ —

—good mood, good mood, he’s feeling _good_ —

Yeah.

He could probably use a distraction right about now.

He’s rustier than he’d expected. He’s gotten so used to being good at things—picking up skills quickly. The serum augmented a lot, but he supposes there’s not much it can do for a lousy sense of composition.

In some sense it’s a relief, that drawing still belongs entirely to him, beyond the reach of the serum.

Still, he can’t help but feel it as a loss. Another bit of him buried in the distant past. Unrecoverable.

Which is silly, really. Drawing is a skill like any other. He learned it once, and he can learn it again. It could be nice, to have something he really has to work at.

The fact that he’d been sketching the Avengers probably hadn’t helped. Not much of a distraction if you’re drawing the very thing you’re trying to distract yourself from.

Besides, he hates to think what Wasp might say if she caught a glimpse at his attempts to capture her most recent costume. Probably she would laugh. Hopefully she would laugh. Wasp laughing is really the best-case scenario here.

He flips to a new page and glances around the room for inspiration. His eye falls on the book he’d just cast aside.

He smiles. Okay. Arthur and his knights. He can do that. And maybe when he’s done he can show it to Iron Man, let him know how much he appreciates Iron Man’s gift. Shellhead will probably get a kick out of that, even if the drawing is kind of lousy.

His first thought is of a battlefield, Arthur rallying his troops atop his noble steed… at least until he remembers that he’ll have to _draw_ said noble steed. He settles on a scene from the novel instead: Arthur and Merlyn at the battlements, overlooking their kingdom.

He draws Merlyn first, wise and a little bit humorous, and—good _god_ hands are difficult to draw. How had he ever managed before? Still, it’s perfectly fitting for someone of Merlyn’s wizardly dignity to stand with his hands clasped behind his back. It’s not giving up, it’s just… _creative problem solving_ , he imagines Iron Man saying, and smiles again.

Then it’s time to turn to Arthur and Steve… he wants to get this _right_. To draw Arthur the way he should be—not as the feckless, battle-hungry youth of White’s imagining, but handsome, kind and noble, a true leader of men.

He maps out a tall frame, leanly muscular, overlays it in mail then sketches the lines of a loose tunic over top, covering the cuirass and heavier plate. A king first and a warrior second, that’s what Arthur should be. His pencil slips as he’s marking the outline of the king’s waving hair, leaving a dark smear of graphite. Steve decides to run with it. No reason why Arthur can’t have dark hair, right?

A strong nose and brow; high cheekbones and piercing, intelligent eyes—not that Steve actually has the skill to place intelligence or any other mental characteristic in someone’s eyes, but he knows it’s there, and that’s good enough for him.

It’s only when he pauses and sits back to assess his progress that he realizes that the face taking shape beneath his unpracticed pencil—he used to be _good_ at this, he’s sure he did—despite his lack of skill bears a distinct and undeniable resemblance to Tony.

And there’s that muscle spasm again, only higher now, and deeper, and it feels—

Rebelliously, he scribbles in a full beard, but it looks wrong, imposed and out of place, like Arthur’s wearing some kind of cheap Halloween costume. And even beneath the beard he can see—how could he have missed it before, when that’s so clearly Tony’s mouth, wide and full lipped on the bottom…

His jeans are suddenly much too tight.

How long has this been building, and all without his noticing? He pops the top button of his jeans, hoping to relieve the pressure, but all he can think about is Tony’s mouth, the elegant line of his mustache, the sharp and almost startlingly deep dip of the cupid’s bow—about how that mustache might feel against his skin, about what it would look like to have those lips stretched around his cock.

He flips the sketchbook shut and shoves it back; spins himself around in his chair. If he has to do this, then he’ll do it, as quickly and efficiently as he can. No harm in thinking… whatever he has to think to get the job done. No harm, and no shame.

(Iron Man said there was no shame.)

He spreads his knees, slides his hips forward on the chair.

Unzips his fly…

Shuts his eyes and pictures Tony kneeling on the floor in front of him.

He’s always imagined—well, always for however long he’s been imagining that kind of thing, anyway—Tony as a leisurely sort of lover, patient, easy, and slow. The sort of person you could laugh with, even in the midst of everything. Rough, sometimes, maybe, when the occasion called for it, but rough like a game, like a shared joke. But this time, somehow, he can’t help but think of… focus. Determination. Lips around him, swallowing him down, sucking at his head like it’s a riddle to be solved, and yet at the same time like the answer to that riddle is something profoundly important, a resolution years in the making. Urgency and care, all at once.

_If I don’t get my hands on you in the next minute I think one of us might spontaneously combust._

God, to have Tony want him like that—

He imagines Tony gazing up at him, the dark wells of his eyes—imagines pushing him back, the slick pop as the seal of his mouth breaks loose from Steve’s skin—imagines Tony on his knees, supplicant, like a pilgrim seeking benediction, and no words at all on his lips because none are needed, it’s all there, in his eyes—

_You look like my unjust reward._

Imagines, _please_ —

He comes hunched over in his chair, soaked in sweat, lungs heaving as though he’s run a great distance.

He blinks spots from his eyes. He feels obscurely like something momentous has happened, but he can’t for the life of him think of what. Or how. Or why.

Still, it’s a long time before the feeling fades.

* * *

Steve goes to the kitchen to fix himself dinner. It’s the first time he’s left his room in several days, but he’s finished the bagels and he’s hungry, and anyway, he’s sick and getting sicker by the hour of his four walls done up in tastefully neutral beige, of his earnest blue bedspread. He knows the reasons he had for locking himself away, and they’re still good reasons, but… surely an hour’s freedom can’t hurt? It’s not like any of the other Avengers are likely to be around. They’ve all got homes of their own to go to.

Except Iron Man, of course. Iron Man might be there.

Steve’s nearly certain he’s got his own digs, but he doubts they’re all that convenient to Manhattan, judging by the frequency with which he sees his friend around the mansion.

But that’s fine, isn’t it. That’s nothing at all to worry about, because Iron Man _knows_ and Steve doesn’t have to hide anymore. Not entirely.

He gets kind of into it, the cooking. Roasted chicken breast with mashed potatoes and broccoli on the side. It’s not… strictly necessary, sure, but it’s healthy, and a nice distraction, and even if spending that long in the kitchen _does_ increase his likelihood of running into someone, that’s not an issue if the only person he’s really at risk of running into is Iron Man.

Not an issue at all.

He doesn’t run into Iron Man.

Which makes sense. It’s not like he’d really expected to. He’s never known Iron Man to use the kitchen except for social purposes, or to pour himself the occasional glass of water (complete with straw).

Shellhead’s probably busy, anyway. Steve took up an awful lot of his time this morning after all. He can’t in good conscience ask for any more just on a whim.

So it’s all fine. It’s good. Steve is… fine.

He eats slowly, lingering over the last few bites, just in case. When he’s finally done kicking his heels, he gets up to wash the dishes. He does it by hand—always by hand. He likes the ritual of it. He takes his time with each plate, thinking of what the other Avengers must be up to right now. Probably out and about as usual, fighting the good fight. Just like Steve would be, if things weren’t so—

There’s a faint chinking sound. Steve looks down to see a crack in the side of his glass, starting just beneath his thumb and radiating down, jagged as a fork of lightning. Looks like he’s got some pent-up energy to work off. What else is new.

When the rest of the dishes are dried and put away, the glass disposed of and an apologetic note left on the refrigerator, Steve goes back to his room. He’s aware he’s dragging his feet, thinking longingly of the gym the whole time, but he knows this mood well enough to know that it could turn at any moment and he doesn’t want to be in a public area when it happens.

Back in his room, he changes into work-out clothes. Does a hundred push-ups, then a hundred more. Wastes almost half an hour on jumping jacks. Does every stretch and warm-up that he can think of. Tries jogging in place.

Nothing helps.

He needs something… physical, yes, definitely physical, but this is the wrong kind of physical. It’s as if there’s a winch set just between his shoulder blades, slowly winding tighter and tighter. He needs…

Well. He knows exactly what he needs, or at least, what he’s about to need. It’s just that it had been such a good morning. For a little while at least.

He could call Iron Man.

Something inside him leaps at the prospect.

Iron Man had _said_. “The minute you need anything,” he’d said, but does this really count as need? He’s been getting along just fine by himself, hasn’t he? Fine enough, anyway. There’s no actual _need_ to bother Iron Man. In fact, there’s probably every reason not to. There was definitely something off in Iron Man’s manner as he’d left this morning. Probably best to give him space until he wants to talk about it, and in the meantime, Steve can take care of himself.

Like he’s always done.

It’ll be fine.

The restless tension in his body must be catching, because by the time he gets himself undressed and spread out on the bed, he can’t seem to settle his mind long enough to get into things. His brain flicks from fantasy to fantasy like cards in a rolodex—a purely mechanical process, devoid of depth or desire. He doesn’t even _want_ yet, not really. He just knows the want is coming and god help him but he wants this to be over.

He wipes off his hands and reaches for his tablet. It’s not like this is the first time he’s struggled to get his mind and his body on the same page. A little research earlier in the week turned up an adult film actor who bore a passing resemblance to Tony—the right coloring, anyway, and similar facial hair, although he doubts Tony has quite so many tattoos—and Steve has been selectively sampling his filmography ever since. He’s not proud of it, but it’s helped him before, when things got really rough, and maybe if he can outsource the fantasizing to his computer screen he’ll finally be able to get on with things.

He’ll need something he hasn’t seen before; something new enough to startle him over the edge. He types the actor’s name into the search bar and scrolls through the results. He passes over a number of videos with titles like “cum a palooza twink party gangbang” and “gay anal bondage slut begs for pounding.” Startling, maybe, but still not something he’s particularly interested in.

Now here’s something a little more his speed. A simple, almost impersonal still of penetration, titled with the blandly descriptive “Dave Andrews tops” followed by the name of another actor Steve doesn’t recognize. Got to be worth a try at least.

He clicks the link.

He just has time to register that the second actor—the one whose name he didn’t recognize—is big, blond, and muscular before the beefy blond guy is on his back with his knees around his ears while the Tony-lookalike slams into him and Steve. Is. _Gone_.

It’s like a match to gasoline. In the space of an instant, the world is remade in red and gold, in hunger and desperate, searing heat. He’s already starting to sweat, his cock hard enough to punch through steel and his pulse throbbing in his veins but all of that pales beside the sudden, overwhelming awareness of his own emptiness. He needs— needs—

He has no words for what he needs. No words at all, only the picture on the screen—only that slick, obscene glide of flesh, in and out, in and out, the smacking impact of bodies and the tinny sound of the blond man’s moans as Tony—God, _Tony—_

Steve feels hollowed out, open and gaping in parts of himself he’s scarcely ever given thought to before. The vision sears like fire across his mind, of Tony taking him, filling him, using Steve’s body for his own pleasure. The void inside him is growing by the minute, a terrible, pulsating emptiness that crowds everything else aside. How long will it be before the emptiness is all there is?

He reaches around behind himself, searching for the entrance into his body, but the muscle there is clenched and unyielding. He presses in anyway. It _hurts_ , sharp and raw and scraping. How can he be so tight and feel so empty? He pushes further in and is rewarded with more pain. He’s barely halfway to his knuckle and already it hurts so much. He thinks you’re supposed to use something, some kind of lubricant to make it easier but he doesn’t have anything like that and he needs this _now_ , god, he needs—

_If you need anything, anything at all, just call me._

Air punches out of him, relief and shock and a fresh, dizzying wave of need. Iron Man had said, he’d _said_ —

He reaches for the nightstand, scrabbling one-handed for his cell phone. He can feel himself clenching tighter around his finger as he moves, and bites down against the soft, desperate sounds that keep working their way out of his throat.

His palms are sweating, hand shaking so badly that he almost knocks the phone off the nightstand before he manages to get a solid grip on it. Iron Man’s number is second in his speed dial, preceded only by the number for the mansion itself. Even so, it takes him three tries to actually put the call through. He drops the phone on the pillow beside him and brings his hand down to wrap around his cock.

Not that it gives him the slightest relief.

He rocks his hips as the phone rings, desperately trying to find some way to accommodate an intrusion which is both far too much and nowhere near enough.

He hears a faint _click_ as the call goes through and is unable to hold back a sob of relief.

“Cap?” Iron Man’s voice is sharp with concern. “You all right? What’s going on?”

“I— please, I need—”

He can feel his mouth moving to shape the words, and he knows them to be true, but they feel at the same time distant from him, like sparks thrown up by the fire currently consuming him, mind and body. And the more he burns, the more the emptiness inside him grows…

“I’m coming up there,” Iron Man says decisively.

“ _Thank you_ ,” Steve breathes.

“Hey, no worries. Like I said, if your cycle’s giving you trouble, I’m happy to lend a hand.” His voice is warm and light, like he’s making a joke, but that’s—that’s not _right_ , that’s not what Steve needs, Iron Man doesn’t understand—

“ _No_ ,” he chokes out.

A fraction of a second’s pause.

“No? You don’t want me to come?”

“Not a—a _hand_.” Lord, he can barely even _speak_ . He’s like an animal; this is what his cycle has reduced him to, and still he needs it, he _needs_ — “I… more, I need to— you— _in_ me.”

For one, long, agonizing moment, Iron Man doesn’t reply. Then:

“Are you— are you asking me to—” His voice sounds, rough—almost parched, but Steve knows what that means. His hips buck upwards in response and he bites down on another cry of pain as the movement shifts the angle of his finger inside him.

“I need it,” Steve says, squeezing his eyes together so tightly he can feel tears spring to the corners of his eyes. “You, I need— oh god, Shellhead, _please_.”

“Okay.” The roughness is still there, but there’s a gentler timbre to Iron Man’s voice now, soothing. “Okay, I’m on my way. Just need to grab some supplies first, but I’ll be there before you know it. Just hang in there, okay? Can you do that for me?”

Steve tries to say _yes_ , because that has to be true—it _has_ to be—but he can’t seem to get the word past his lips.

“Cap? You hear me?”

He—he should say _something_ , he has to—

“Steve? Are you there? I just need to know if you’re— Come on, please.” The worry has returned to Iron Man’s voice, sharper now than before, a bleeding edge.

Steve wets his lips and reaches for words of reassurance but finds none. He feels one of the tears finally spill from the corner of his eye, darts out his tongue to taste the salt as it trickles down his cheek.

“Hurry,” is all he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was Doomquest week over at the SteveTony bookclub when I wrote the first half of this chapter, but I'm sure that didn't affect anything unduly. *coughs*
> 
> You may have noticed the estimated chapter count has changed. We have reached the end of the prepublished material and as such there will no longer be a regular update schedule; however, due to outline tweaks, the next chapter is completely written and will be up on Wednesday. It's a shortie, but a goodie, I hope.
> 
> Next Time: Folks, we’re approaching a bit of a rough patch, moderate to severe turbulence ahead. Please note that the fasten seat-belt sign is now on; flight attendants, secure the cabin.


	9. the time of the season for loving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all-new, never before posted! unbeta-ed: all mistakes are my own.

Steve doesn’t know how long it takes Iron Man to reach him. Time rapidly loses its significance as a measurable concept, giving way first to duration and then to simple endurance. Everything falls away until there is nothing left but the heat: the relentless burn where his finger has breached his body, the encompassing flames of his own desire. The fever climbs outside his body, searing the shape of absence into the air—Steve’s terrible, blazing need given form: arms, legs, a torso… He squeezes his eyes shut tight as Tony looms over him, the colors of the fire bleeding across his face, casting his features in scarlet and molten gold.

“ _Steve_ ,” he says, voice crackling like a hearth fire, “ _Steve—_ ”

A rapping at the door, sharp and urgent. It pierces through the haze even as the voice continues, the crackling of kindling resolving into the familiar static of Iron Man’s modulator.

“Steve, are you there?”

“I’m here,” Steve calls out. His voice is hoarse; it breaks down the middle.

“The door’s locked. Are you able to let me in?”

Steve cracks open one eye, then the other, staring down at his sweat-slicked torso, at the place where his hand vanishes beneath ( _inside_ ) his body. Gritting his teeth, he tugs his finger free and grabs hold of the bedsheet instead, pulling the cotton tight over his curled fingers.

All he has to do is stand, walk the dozen-odd feet to the door—

He shuts his eyes again.

“I’m not sure.” A confession.

Iron Man swears, almost too low for Steve to catch. “Okay,” he says. “I don’t have the master key; not on me. I can run and get it—”

Steve isn’t quick enough to stifle the noise of distress that escapes him. It’s fine. It has to be. He’s made it this far. He can wait a little longer, he can—

“—or I can blast the lock.”

Steve thinks he might once have been embarrassed at the way he gasps out his relief. “The—the second one. Please.” His hips lift on the word, quite of their own accord, and he is so dizzyingly aware of the space that want has burned away inside him that he misses Iron Man’s reply. The next sound he registers is the whine of repulsors.

The door swings open.

With his eyes shut tight, Steve has no way of knowing what he looks like, but judging by Iron Man’s hissing intake of breath, he must be quite a sight. Well. He can be self-conscious later; right now, he just needs—

And that’s right, he’s forgotten something, hasn’t he?

“I’ll just,” he mumbles, or thinks he does, and grabs the bedsheet, preparing to tear off another strip.

“Hey, no.” Iron Man hurries towards him, boots clunking softly on the carpeted floor. “I’ve got you. Lift your head?”

Steve lifts his head, feeling the muscles in his neck straining—an obscene amount of effort for such a simple gesture.

Fabric slides across his cheekbones, his shut eyes and the bridge of his nose. It feels expensive, smooth and cool as water.

“That’s a little nicer, isn’t it,” Iron Man is saying, and Steve forces himself to smile, as if he wouldn’t have let Iron Man stuff his head into a burlap sack if that’s what it took.

Iron Man’s fingers are careful and far, far too slow as he knots the blindfold into place. “Not too tight?”

“It’s _fine_.” It comes out harsher than Steve intended, but he doesn’t know how to take it back; speech is enough of a struggle as it is.

Iron Man pulls away. “Right,” he says, and takes a deep breath, like he’s rallying himself for something. “Let me slip into something a little more, uh… less.” The there’s nothing but the clinks and clinks and rustles of Iron Man undressing.

A bead of sweat rolls down Steve’s forehead. It changes course when it meets the blindfold, chasing the edge of the fabric down towards his temple. He bites the inside of his cheek.

“You’re sure about this?” Iron Man asks abruptly, and Steve realizes the other sounds have stopped.

Flames lick at his hollow places. He knots his fingers more tightly in the sheets and feels the cotton fibers begin to give under the strain.

“I’m sure.”

“Because if not, I don’t mind— I’m more than happy to bottom, or to do something else entirely, if that’s what you—”

Steve groans. “I _need_ ,” he says, praying that Iron Man won’t make him articulate it further.

“Hey.” The mattress dips beneath new weight; a hand curls across the top of Steve’s knee, rough and warm and unspeakably _human_. “Hey. Anything you need, you can have, okay?” Iron Man’s thumb rubs at Steve’s skin, at the place where the muscle meets the bone. “I just…” An audible swallow. “I want to be sure you’re not going to regret this.”

There’s an ache in his voice almost as keen as Steve’s own, and Steve doesn’t understand how that could be unless… Unless Steve’s finally asked too much. (Unless he finally _is_ too much. Broken. Needy. But Iron Man said it was fine, he _said_ —)

“If,” Steve says, and every word is a battle, “if _you_ don’t want to—”

“That’s not the issue here,” Iron Man says, a little sharply. “This is about you. Do you still want… what you were saying over the phone?”

The way Steve’s insides throb at the mere suggestion should more than answer the question, but Iron Man can’t know that, can he, so Steve wets his lips and breathes his answer into the dark.

“Yes.”

Iron Man’s breath catches, but his voice is firm when he says, “Then that’s what you’ll get.”

Steve can’t help himself: he shudders, a wracking, full body thing. His lips shape a plea, or maybe a prayer; even he isn’t certain which.

“Okay,” Iron Man says, and again, there’s that odd, rallying note to his voice, but this is hardly the time to think what that might mean. The mattress jostles under Iron Man’s weight as he moves. The hand on Steve’s knee slides down the slope of his thigh and back again, and then Iron Man is nudging his other knee aside and settling himself between them. Something cold and metal presses against his leg—Iron Man’s chestplate.

“Hi,” Iron Man says, and Steve manages another smile, slightly less forced than the first. “So, normally I like a bit more foreplay, but I’m getting the sense that things are more… immediate this time?”

Steve nods. His cheeks are burning, right along with the rest of him.

“Well. Good thing I came prepared, then.” His voice drops. “I’m going to take care of you, Cap. You just relax.”

The instruction is no sooner given than Iron Man renders it impossible, as one of Iron Man’s hands covers Steve’s cock, giving him a few gentle strokes, almost a reassurance, and it feels so good—so damn _good_ and so desperately inadequate that Steve wants to scream. He grits his teeth, unable to keep his back from arching, and hears the click of a bottle opening.

The hand on his cock withdraws. There’s a liquid sound, and then Iron Man is parting Steve’s cheeks, baring him, and Steve wonders if it’s possible to die of anticipation.

Iron Man sucks in a breath.

“Aw, jeez, Cap. What have you been doing to yourself?”

A damp finger begins to circle, ever so gently, the inflamed skin around Steve’s rim.

“P- _please_ ,” Steve stammers.

“We… might have to go a little slower after all. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I don’t care—”

“Well, I do,” Iron Man says sharply. “I’m not doing this to hurt you. That’s the last thing I—” He makes a frustrated noise. Then, more gently: “I want to help you feel better.” His finger skates back and forth over Steve’s entrance, probing with gentle pressure at the place where the muscle turns inwards, and if Steve has ever wanted anything more than he wants this, he can’t remember it now.

The movement stops.

“You’re sure this is what you want?”

“I _said_ ,” Steve growls, which is unworthy, but for god’s sake, how many times is Iron Man going to make him say it before he gives him what he needs?

“You’re all clenched up,” Iron Man tells him, voice gentle, undemanding. “If we’re going to do this, you need to relax.”

Oh.

For a moment, the fire in Steve’s cheeks is out-burning the ones inside him.

“I don’t…” He trails away. “How?”

There’s a brief pause. Then: “You have to bear down.”

“Bear…?”

“Guess it’s been a while, huh? Um. Sort of, push down and outwards, kind of like you’re— Hell, there’s no delicate way of saying this—”

But Steve thinks he understands. “Like this?”

And he knows it must be right because the tip of Iron Man’s finger dips inside of him. He stifles a gasp, but all Iron Man does is swipe a little lube across the walls, soft and shallow, in and out in a moment.

“Just like that,” Iron Man praises, as his finger circles round and presses in again, a gentle but unmistakable intrusion. “All coming back to you now?” There’s something in his voice that’s more than an idle question, but Steve doesn’t know what to do with that—can’t _think_ , so he just nods in answer.

Iron Man lets out a breath.

“Yeah,” he says, a little more color in his voice. “Yeah, that’s it. You’re doing great.” His spare hand strokes Steve’s flank as Steve draws breath in shallow gasps and blinks away stars.

“That feels…” Steve pushes down again, and both he and Iron Man gasp together as Iron Man’s finger slips even further inside him.

“Yeah?”

“That— _oh_.”

“You like this,” Iron Man says wondrously, finger picking up pace as Steve lets out a low keen of agreement. “You really, really like this. You’ve been holding out on me, Winghead.”

Steve shakes his head, thrashing it against the pillow. “I didn’t— didn’t _know_. That it was— That it could—” He continues to shake his head, even as the words fall away.

All movement ceases. Steve lies panting, face damp with sweat, waiting for language to return to him. For words like _Why._ Like _Don’t stop_. Like _More_. Like _Please_.

“Cap,” Iron Man says, and there’s something terribly hesitant—tremulous—in his voice. “Cap, you— You have done this before?”

There’s a weight and an import to the question—even through everything else, Steve can sense that. It’s almost enough to make him want to pretend misunderstanding—to say, yes, of course he has, of course he’s done this before. He is so far from being a virgin, after all.

But he knows what Iron Man is asking—god, does he know. Has he done _this_ —the burn and the stretch, the slow cramming of foreign heat into his empty places. Has he ever been this empty; has he ever taken it upon himself to be full, and the answer is no, of course, no.

“Not,” he says reluctantly, “with a man.”

Iron Man sucks in a breath.

“Oh god,” he says. “Oh god, I’m so sorry, I should never— This is wrong, I can’t—”

He pulls away, pulls out of Steve and every nerve in Steve’s body screams in protest. Steve reaches out, blindly.

“No, no, don’t go, I need—”

“You shouldn’t,” Iron Man says hoarsely. “Not with me. It should be someone else, someone who—”

“ _Please_.” The word falls like a sob from his lips. “Please, it has to be you, you’re the only one I can trust—”

The groan Iron Man gives at these words sounds like it was ripped out of him, but Steve is only half listening. Something awful has just occurred to him.

“Unless— If you’ve changed your mind, if you don’t want— I don’t mean to pressure— It’s—” _Fine_ , he tries to say—tries to force out the lie through unwilling lips, because it’s not fine, it’s the least fine thing in the world, but he doesn’t want Iron Man to do anything he doesn’t want to do.

“ _No_ ,” Iron Man says fervently, “ _god_ , no, how could you think—”

“Then _please_.” Steve makes another grab and this time manages to secure Iron Man’s upper arm. His palms are slick with sweat but he just holds on all the tighter. Iron Man’s muscles bunch as he shifts forward and Steve whines as the image of Tony kneeling over him enters his mind, the way his biceps would shift and cord as he braced himself, driving into Steve hard and fast—

Steve spreads his legs wider and gives Iron Man a plaintive little tug. His eyes beneath the blindfold have begun to tear up.

“You don’t understand.” Iron Man’s voice is like broken glass—perilously fractured, jagged and brittle—but his hands are back on Steve’s body, massaging the cheeks of his ass, spreading him apart once again and Steve is so close to what he’s seeking he can practically taste it, his need a tight and heavy weight in his balls, on his tongue. “There are _reasons_ —things you don’t know, and I can’t— It’s not right—”

Steve shakes his head because Iron Man is the one who doesn’t understand. “I need _you_ ,” he says, barely aware of what he’s saying, only that he needs to make Iron Man _see_ . “It has to be you, you’re the only one, Tony, I _need_ —” and there’s something wrong in there, he knows, but he can’t quite put his finger on what.

Iron Man makes an odd hiccoughing sort of noise, a little like a laugh and a little like a sob and not very much like either.

“Yeah,” he says, heartbreakingly soft, “yeah. If that’s what you need, I can—I can give you that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys didn't think we were gonna get through this without dealing with the consent issues inherent in identity porn, did you? LOL
> 
> Next time: Steve gets what he's asking for. But probably not in the way you're expecting. 
> 
> A reminder, though, that we are now no longer on regular updates. The next chapter will be up when it's done, and while I am working on it diligently, I cannot predict to any degree of certainty how soon that may be. Hopefully before the end of the month. Thanks as always for reading, and most especially to those who take the time to leave feedback! <3


	10. what's your name?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you, thank you to demigodscum for very energizing cheerreading, and wynnesome and cptxrogers for invaluable betawork and brainstorming help!

Steve is aware, in a distant, hard-to-reach kind of way, that there’s something else going on here—something he’s missing, some added layer of complication. He tries to make himself focus through the overpowering haze of his desire, but just then a lube-slicked finger comes to rest over his entrance and all other thoughts fall from his mind. He bears down the way Iron Man taught him, inviting him into his body. Iron Man makes no effort to press inside. Steve makes a quiet noise of need and frustration and shoves his hips forward.

Iron Man places quelling a hand on Steve’s thigh. He’s not applying enough force to hold even an unenhanced man down, and it sets Steve’s teeth on edge, to let  such a gentle touch restrain him. Nevertheless, he stills.

Iron Man’s thumb rubs at the skin of his inner thigh. Steve takes it first for an indication of approval, but as the seconds tick past, the movement continues, one thumb skating back and forth across Steve’s thigh, tic-like, relentless, even as the finger over Steve’s hole remains maddeningly still.

Steve pushes forward again. Iron Man’s thumb ceases its restless motion, and he presses down more firmly on Steve’s leg. Still not firmly enough, though. Steve snaps his hips, half-demanding, half-seeking to bypass all demands entirely and impale himself on Iron Man’s finger.

“God dammit, Steve, I’m trying to think—”

“I  _ need _ —” The words sound shrill, peevish, to Steve’s own ears. It serves only to feed the resentment growing within him, that Iron Man is pushing him to this, making him beg, making him  _ wait _ , with the want bloody and pulsing like a second heartbeat inside him—

“I know.” There’s something raw in Iron Man’s voice now, something shivering and small peeping through a broken shell. “I know you do. And I’m— I’m going to give it to you, but I don’t—” Iron Man swallows. When he speaks again, his tone has changed, as if he’d originally intended to say something else entirely. “I still have to open you up, anyway.”

_ So  _ _ do _ _ it. _

The words are there, hot and ready on Steve’s tongue. He isn’t sure what makes him hesitate. That sense, maybe, persistent even through his want and his mounting frustration, that there’s something more to this than what he can see.

He shakes it off. Irrelevant. Opens his mouth to speak.

Iron Man beats him to it.

“But—” Another fracture, another hitch in the reel. “But if you want… If it helps, you can…” Iron Man’s voice trails away, not as if he’s lost his train of thought, but as if he’s lost the words with which to express it. “Pretend.”

The word is shot through with something Steve can’t even begin to identify.

“Pretend?” he echoes.

“That I’m him.” Iron Man’s voice is quiet enough that anyone but a super soldier would have to strain to hear. “We can— We can both pretend.”

It’s a moment before Steve understands, and when he does, the enormity of the idea swells before him, growing and growing until it’s taken up all the air in the room, until it’s the only thing he can see—touch—taste, until—

It pops.

Ire rushes in, filling the empty space. “I don’t understand,” he snaps. Because isn’t that what they’ve been doing this whole time? More or less, anyway, and he doesn’t understand why Iron Man sounds so damn hesitant about it, why he’s even bringing it up at all, when it’s not what Steve asked for, what Iron Man knows Steve  _ needs _ —

At least, he’s almost sure it’s not what he asked for, but the thoughts are all mixed up in his head, need and frustration leaking in, muddying the waters, stealing the last vestiges of his clarity.

Iron Man draws a slow, deliberate breath. “I can show you.”

He says it like a question, and Steve is just about to snap out a refusal when Iron Man’s finger— _ finally _ —begins to move, tracing small, slick-smooth circles over tightly puckered skin, and the next thing Steve knows he’s nodding. Crossed wires, he thinks vaguely, but—god, it feels so  _ good _ …

“Yeah,” Iron Man says. “Okay.” Another long, shuddering inhalation, and then…

Then something in his voice shifts.

Steve’s attention snaps back to him like a rubber band, and he doesn’t understand it, he doesn’t understand it at all because the modulator is still working, rendering the human voice beneath into something mechanized, something tinny and unnatural and yet somehow…

He doesn’t sound like Iron Man anymore.

“Hey there, Cap. Heard you’ve been having a bit of a rough time. Anything I can do to help?”

And just like that, all the air has gone out of the room again.

“I— I— You—”

He knows it was Iron Man who spoke, he knows, but god—and here he shivers, head to toe, goosebumps rising in its wake—god, that  _ inflection _ —

“Good?” And there’s Iron Man again—his real voice, or at least, the one Steve knows as his, sounding pleased and strangely desolate all at once.

Steve nods, still gasping, then shakes his head.

“No good? Help me out here, Winghead.”

He bites down on his lip, hands fisting in the bedsheets. “I— I can’t—”

Iron Man’s hand slides down Steve’s thigh to rub reassuringly at the crease of his knee. “Hey, that’s fine. We don’t have to. I just thought it might be— I thought it might help.” And then, as Steve continues at a loss for words, “I mean, he’s what you want, right? Tony Stark?”

There’s no way to hide it, the tremor of desire that goes through him, the way his hips lift and his knees spread even wider apart at the name, but—

It’s too much. It has to be too much. There has to be a limit, to how much he can ask, how much he can  _ expect _ …

How much Iron Man can be willing to give.

“I can’t ask you to—”

Iron Man’s hand stops. “You’re not asking. I’m offering, okay?”

“But…”

Steve can sense the objections, massing just out of reach, and he can’t quite seem to close the distance, to assemble the requisite words in his head. Not with the prospect lurking before him, like the sun easing out from behind clouds, bright and warm and obliterating, of Iron Man doing it again—speaking to him like that, saying those things,  _ being Tony _ .

For  _ Steve _ .

“It’s okay, if it’s something you need.” The sadness in Iron Man’s voice eddies and deepens, like drops of ink falling into clear water. “It’s just pretend, after all. Who can it hurt?”

“I don’t  _ need _ …” Steve protests, but he’s wavering now, pulled thin between his desire and Iron Man’s urging and he doesn’t know what to do, how to balance what he wants with what is right—

“But you do want it? You liked it?”

Tony’s face swirls and coalesces out of the darkness. He’s smiling, as he so often is when he looks at Steve, but as Steve watches the smile goes crooked, something speculative entering the expression, chased by something darker, something greedy and  _ toothed _ .

Behind the blindfold, Steve screws his eyes tighter shut, as if that could block out the hunger on Tony’s face, as if that image wasn’t the product of his own fevered mind…

“Yes,” he whispers.

“Then— Then that’s all that matters. And if you decide you don’t like it, if you want to stop for any reason at all, just… just say my name, okay?”

Something stirs at the back of Steve’s mind, a wriggling disquiet, because of course he doesn’t  _ know _ Iron Man’s name—

“Just say ‘Shellhead,’ and we’ll stop.”

And just like that, Steve feels the tension inside him ease by several notches. He’s here with Shellhead—his Shellhead, who knows him better than any other soul in this strange, new world, and maybe Steve doesn’t know his face or his civilian identity, but he knows him by the only name that matters.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?” and now Iron Man is the one who sounds uncertain.

Steve smiles, trying to put all the warmth he has in him into the expression. “I trust you,” he says simply.

For one heartbeat, Iron Man is perfectly still. Another beat passes, and then another, and Steve is just beginning to wonder if he said something wrong when Iron Man lets out a shaky laugh.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay, I—” and now his voice is dropping, taking on that rich, easy timbre that makes the hairs stand up on the back of Steve’s neck.

“So.” The thumb on Steve’s knee tilts, one close-cropped thumbnail scoring a line of sensation across his skin. “Where were we?”

Steve doesn’t answer— _ can’t _ answer, can’t seem to do anything except gasp and shudder and blink back stars.

A second finger joins the one already skating across Steve’s entrance. They begin to tug and stretch the skin, pulling the puckers smooth and taut.

“That’s right. You’d gotten yourself into a bit of a fix, at least from what I’d heard.” The words—the tone—are teasing but warm. Conspiratorial. It’s just what Steve imagined it would be like, with Tony, and it’s so easy to pretend, here, in the dark, with that voice sending sly tendrils of heat snaking through him. Iron Man  _ wants _ him to pretend, so there’s no harm, is there, in giving himself over to the fantasy. “Heard I might be able to give you a hand with that. Or…” echoing Steve’s earlier pleas back at him “…something more than a hand, hmm?”

Steve’s breathing goes rough and shallow as he cants his hips towards that awful, tantalizing touch, because god, he  _ needs  _ that, needs it so much that the wanting feels like a whole second person packed inside his skin, but still he can’t help protesting, “I didn’t  _ get myself—” _

A hand slides around Steve’s leg, arm crooking beneath his knee, tugging him closer.

“It’s okay,” the voice soothes. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t choose this.” A huff of air crackles through the modulator. “Believe me, I know,” and Steve doesn’t understand—is this still meant to be in character? Is it Tony or Iron Man speaking to him now? The voice seems to occupy some as-yet undefined middle ground.

“Although,” the voice adds, and Steve shudders, because  _ that _ —that fire-warmed deliberation is Tony all over, “I can’t quite bring myself to object to the result. I mean,  _ look  _ at you.”

The body at the base of the bed shifts, pulls back a little, as if he intends to do just that. Steve lets out a guttural sound of frustration and denial.

“I know,” Tony’s voice says sympathetically. “I’m being an awful tease, aren’t I? Let’s see if I can make it up to you.” A moment’s pressure—Steve’s heart turns over—and then the finger twists and slips inside.

Sparks flare across the darkness of Steve’s vision. He can feel his inner walls twitching and convulsing around the unfamiliar presences as it rocks in and out and in again. His cock slaps wetly against his abs as he squirms, hips twisting. He’s not really sure if he’s trying to get away or get closer still, the intrusion so alien and yet so utterly inadequate. Part of him doesn’t even like it, but even the way he dislikes it makes his mouth water, and he needs it to stop, and he needs  _ more _ , right now, right this very second—

“Easy there.” Steve pictures Tony’s face, his smile lazy—indulgent—but with something heated and intent flaring behind the eyes. “Gonna get you nice and loose and ready for me. How does that sound?”

The movements of—Iron Man’s? no,  _ Tony’s _ , let it be Tony’s finger, here where there’s no one but Iron Man ever to know and no one at all to judge—of Tony’s finger inside him are so slight, so gentle, more than accommodating of Steve’s soreness, but even the smallest shift sends sensation rippling through his body, tiny and momentous as the flap of a butterfly’s wings.

“I want to be,” he breathes, through the darkness and the heat. “I— _ oh _ —I want to be that, for you.”

“Yeah?” A darker tone enters Tony’s voice. “All for me, huh?”

“All,” Steve gasps, and then, when this seems inadequate, “all, all.”

Tony hums low in his throat. “You sure know how to make a guy feel special.” He crooks his finger, tugging lightly at the ring of muscle just past Steve’s entrance, and Steve feels himself beginning to give way.

“Get a load of you,” Tony says, and Steve can just  _ see _ his expression, hot and satisfied and a little bit wicked, curling beneath his mustache. “Opening right up for me like that, like you were born to it. You’ll be ready for another finger soon, I think.”

Steve’s mouth falls open. He’s panting after it like a dog now, and he can’t even bring himself to care.

Tony’s finger pulls out; his hands withdraw. Steve lets out a whine of protest, but even he has to acknowledge it was for a good cause when two freshly lubed fingers return to tease at his opening. A slick palm wraps itself around his cock.

“That’s it, beautiful,” Tony approves, as Steve gives a shout and thrusts upwards. “Take what you need.”

The words hit Steve… wrong. He bites down on his lip, holding back the retort.  _ I thought you were going to give it to me. _

Tony already knows what Steve needs. He’s just working on getting there. Steve can wait; Tony  _ promised—  _ Or, at least, Iron Man promised, but Tony  _ is  _ Iron Man, really, so— Or is it more right to say that Iron Man is Tony? Pretending to be Tony, that is—Steve’s not so far gone that he doesn’t know fact from fiction, so why does the thought itch like that? It’s all so complicated and everything’s getting muddled in his head—

“Hey.” Once again, the voice occupies some strange, liminal space, and Steve can’t tell who’s supposed to be speaking it. “You still with me?”

“I’m— yeah.” Steve rubs at his eyes through the blindfold, dragging himself back from whatever mental abyss he’d been teetering on the edge of.

“Yeah?” The voice sounds uncertain.

Steve nods, more firmly. “Just got a little distracted.”

A second ticks by, and then two, and then—

“That so?” Steve shivers. Something both steely and sly is wending its way through Tony’s words—and it is, unmistakably, Tony who’s speaking now. “I must not be doing my job. Let’s see if we can’t give you something to focus on.”

_ We _ , Steve thinks, and for a moment he imagines both of them standing over him, Tony and Iron Man together, conferring, conspiring, plotting out the course of Steve’s pleasure, and—

And there’s that muddle again, hot and cloying, threatening overwhelm. Something distressingly like panic, sharp-toed and scrabbling, stirs in his chest. It’s too much—it was all a mistake—everything is blurring and he’s losing himself again. He opens his mouth to—there’s something he’s supposed to say, if it stops being good, but he can’t quite seem to—to—

Then a hand strokes down his cock and fingers press gently at his opening and a voice is saying “Ready” and somehow Steve is nodding and then there’s one— _ two  _ fingers pushing inside and— and it’s—

One finger was strange—a foreign object, an intrusion. But  _ two _ …

Two is full and more than full. Two demands accommodation, a giving of ground, reshaping his body to allow the fit.

The thought leaves him wet-mouthed and wordless, lips working silently as the fingers begin to move inside him, scissoring apart, readying him for a greater trespass yet to come.

Tony’s voice bubbles through the modulator, hot and dark and rich as coffee. “How’s that?”

Steve thinks maybe he gasps, or maybe it’s his face that gives him away, because Tony chuckles, low and pleased.

“That good already? Sweetness, we’re just getting started.” 

There’s something off about the words. Something faintly jarring, even through the building sensation, like a note played out of sequence or out of tune. A certain cockiness, Tony’s native assurance shading towards an un-Tony-like arrogance. Steve tenses and twitches, brows drawing together in a frown.

But then the fingers slide deeper and twist and crook and everything goes hot and bright with pleasure.

“Oh, wow.” No arrogance discernable in the voice now—indeed, something closer to awe has crept in, touching the edges with gold—and Steve lets himself relax back into the fantasy, that he’s lying here, skinned and splayed and open as a carcass trimmed for roasting, for Tony’s benefit—that it’s Tony standing over him, his clever fingers and bright, eager eyes, the way he gets with a new piece of tech, like Steve is the greatest thing he’s ever seen and he’s going to take him apart, make him new, make him  _ better _ —

“You’re really sensitive there, huh?” Tony says as he rubs his fingers back and forth over the spot he’d found. Sparks shoot through Steve, shower after shower, flaring up at each pass, and he thinks of Tony in his workshop, welding torch in hand—thinks of brilliance and heat and focus that reshapes the world.

He moans aloud and is rewarded with a hand tightening around his cock, working him up and down in slow, even strokes. It feels so good that for a moment, he’s worried he’ll go off right there, before Tony— _no,_ _Iron Man_ , something in him corrects and is summarily ignored—even has a chance to give him what he needs. He reaches down to knock the hand aside, wrapping his own around the base of his shaft and squeezing past the point of comfort, but once the danger is past even he can’t resist moving his hand a little, voicing his pleasure in half-words and choked off groans as Tony determinedly works him open.

Two fingers become three. The sparks behind Steve’s eyes gather and blossom into full-blown fireworks, or maybe they’re not fireworks at all but shells bursting above the patter of gunfire, bright and loud and relentless. Steve is saying Tony’s name now, the same two syllables over and over and yet different every time, a prayer, a protest, a plea.

“Tony, Tony, ah, ah, Tony,  _ ngh _ , T-Tony.” And then—as the pleasure picks up speed and momentum once again, barreling rapidly towards freefall—with increased urgency and shoving blindly at Tony’s hands, “Tony,  _ Tony _ —”

The offending hands are yanked away, fingers sliding loose with a pop even as Steve’s muscles, independent of his conscious will, tighten and clench and seek to trap them inside.

“Not—” Steve gets out, struggling to convey, with the limited words in his grasp, that there’s nothing wrong, that it’s entirely the opposite, “not  _ wrong _ , just— just too— I didn’t…  _ want _ — n-not yet, not wi— without—”  _ Not without you _ , he means to say, but his mouth isn’t fully under his control at the moment.

Fortunately, Tony seems to understand.

“Moving too fast?” A note of relief rings clear in his voice. “Well. I mean, it’s good that you were liking it that much, anyway. Right? Let’s just… take a breather, then.”

Steve nods, grateful.

The next few minutes are mostly silent, apart for a few faint shifts and rustles and the susurration of their mingled breathing. Steve focuses on regulating his own breaths, taking in air on long, deepening inhalations and releasing it on longer exhales, and gradually his heartrate slows to a steadier pound.

“How’s it going?” Tony asks.

“S’good,” Steve slurs. “Think’m almost…”

“Almost, huh? But not all the way there, it sounds like.” That warm, teasing note is back in Tony’s voice. “We’ll give it another minute or so. Just to be on the safe side.”

Steve nods agreeably. “Thanks, T’ny.” 

The figure at the end of the bed goes suspiciously still. Steve wonders if he’s said something wrong. Is—is Iron Man not meant to be in character anymore? He thinks maybe he’s forgotten how to tell the difference. 

“Or… Iron Man?” he hazards. 

A crackling huff of air. “Tony’s fine, Cap. It’s whatever you like.” He brushes Steve’s knee in a fleeting caress. 

Steve frowns. It doesn’t exactly  _ sound _ fine, not the way T—Iron Man says it, and Steve feels a resurgent wave of irritation. It’s not his fault this is all so—so damn confusing. It’s not like any of this was his idea to begin with. He didn’t ask for this—he only asked for one thing, one thing he  _ still hasn’t been given— _

His balls draw tighter as hollowness gapes inside him. Why won’t Tony—Iron Man— _ damn it _ —just—just—

The figure at the end of the bed leans forward, dragging his fingernails up the curving line of Steve’s thigh.

“Anything you like,” he says huskily.

Steve shivers, lets his head fall back. He thinks it’s meant to be Tony speaking now, but to be honest, he doesn’t really care. The  _ promise _ in that voice…

The gesture is repeated. “You like that?”

Steve nods, makes a throaty sound of agreement.

“Yeah?” And then, the last bit of hesitance bleeding from the voice, replaced by a low, thrumming satisfaction, “Yeah. Spread your legs a little more for me. That’s perfect.”

He shifts closer still. Steve’s whole body tenses in pleasurable anticipation.

“God, you’re beautiful,” Tony breathes. “Never seen anything like you.” The praise has just begun to trickle, sweet and molten down Steve’s spine and into his stomach, when he adds,  “and lord knows I’ve been around the block a time or two.”

And there it is again. That false, winking confidence, with none of the thoughtfulness, the wry self-awareness that Steve has come to know. It could pass, just barely, for the slickly polished man Steve glimpses sometimes on the cover of magazines.

“Steve?” It’s Iron Man speaking this time, voice edged with concern, and how could Steve ever have mistaken the one voice for the other? There it is, all the kindness, all the solicitude Steve had missed. Something Iron Man and his boss have in common.

He smiles at the thought. “S’nothing.”

He guesses Iron Man just doesn’t know his boss that well after all.

“I, um,” and yes, that’s definitely Iron Man. “I actually think you’re ready, anyway. If— If you still want…?”

Steve goes cold, then hot. His insides throb, wet and open and wanting as the word tumbles out of his mouth with unseemly haste:  _ “Yes.” _

“I—” A loud exhalation hisses through the modulator. “Right. Yeah. Okay, just— Just let me, um.” Iron Man’s weight begins shifting around on the mattress again. “Find…”

Anticipation buzzes in Steve’s teeth, knots and squirms at the base of his spine. He plants his feet more firmly, tilts his hips up and outwards, lets his body do the pleading.

Iron Man is feeling around for something. His hand pats over Steve’s foot, once, twice. He curses under his breath. “Where did I— Dammit.” The shifting becomes unidirectional—Iron Man is moving towards the edge of the mattress. He’s going to get up.

Before he has a chance to think about what he’s doing, Steve shoots out a leg, trying to hook Iron Man’s arm with his foot. The blindfold must’ve disoriented him worse than he thought because he misses, heel sliding across a plane of cool metal before his ankle is caught between two callused hands and gently pulled away.

“Cap? What’s—”

“You were leaving,” Steve tries to explain. It’s only when the words are out of his mouth that he realizes how ridiculous that sounds. “I—” He clenches his jaw. “Sorry.”

“Leaving? I was just…” Iron Man makes a soft noise and trails off. One of his hands shifts on  Steve’s foot, thumb sliding down to massage at the instep. “I was looking for a condom. I think they might have fallen off the bed.”

“Oh. Do you… do we need…?”

Iron Man has just set Steve’s foot back on the sheets and is in the middle of pulling away, but he stops at that, fingertips still resting on Steve’s ankle. “Do we need protection? It’s usually advisable.”

“I just thought…” Steve shifts a little. He wants Iron Man’s touch, its steadying warmth, but he can’t help but be reminded of all the ways Iron Man  _ isn’t  _ touching him. “S’not like you’re gonna get me into trouble.”

Now Iron Man does pull back. “Into trouble?” He sounds confused, and faintly alarmed.

Do people not say it like that anymore? “You know. In the family way. And I can’t catch anything, so…”

Another pause. Steve squirms again, trying to find comfort, but it’s no good—the emptiness moves right along with him.

“I guess not,” Iron Man says, an odd reluctance in his voice. “I just thought… Well, I mean, there’s the mess…”

_ The mess.  _ Lube and sweat and spend, leaking out of him, slick on his thighs… He wonders if he’ll be able to feel it when Iron Man comes inside of him, whether the heat and wet of it will register inside the wet heat of his own body.

“Actually,” he says, and his voice cracks. “I, um. Uh…”

“Oh.” The syllable seems to hang in the air for a moment. Iron Man clears his throat. “That, uh… I mean, if you _like—”_ He sounds awfully hesitant about it. 

“We don’t have to.”

“No, it’s… fine,” Iron Man says, like he’s asking a question. “Whatever you want, right? So, if you… if you want it, it’s okay.”

The last words are tinged with something like pleading, and Steve—he means to be good, he really does, to say what’s right, to give Iron Man an out, but what he  _ says  _ is, “I want it.” The truth of the statement echoes through him. His body seems cavernous, hollow with need.

“Okay,” Iron Man says. “Okay,” and then his voice drops, and Steve can tell he’s feeling around for that other cadence, find Tony’s voice again but somehow it doesn’t ring quite right. “Far be it from me,” he’s saying, as he’s leans forward, “to deny—”

Steve reaches out, catching at Iron Man’s arm this time. “You don’t have to,” he says. “Be him, I mean.”

There’s a moment’s pause. Steve’s hand is on Iron Man’s bicep. He can feel the edges of a scar, smooth and raised, under his thumb. He resists the urge to trace it. Somehow, he suspects Iron Man wouldn’t like that, to be known in this way.

“Okay?” A world of uncertainty in that single word. 

“Unless you want to,” Steve adds, hastily, and winces. Because of course Iron Man  _ wants  _ to pretend to be his boss, that sounds incredibly likely.

(But then why did he offer in the first place?)

“I just want,” and there’s a tightness to Iron Man’s voice, a barely roped-in frustration, “to give you what you want.”

“I  _ know _ ,” Steve says, and now his own frustration is rising again, “I—” He bites his tongue.

“What do you want, Steve?”

And god, but isn’t that a question for the ages. What does he want? What does he  _ want? _

He wants Tony. He wants not to want Tony. He wants not to need this—any of this, not to have to ask these things. He wants—not to be normal, never that, quite, but to be steady, regulated, in control, of himself, his desires, his circumstances… And most of all, seething up through everything else, hot and insistent and leaking out of every pore—

“I just want you,” Steve says. _In me, now,_ is the unspoken follow-up.

Iron Man gives one of his odd, twisty laughs. “That’s all, huh?”

And now Steve  _ has _ said something wrong, he’s sure of it. This is, all of this, going wrong, and it chokes in his throat, with all the raging need inside him and he can’t—he  _ can’t _ —

A hand comes down over his, and he realizes he’s been clutching at the bedsheets again.

“Hey,” Iron Man’s voice says, with all the steadiness Steve lacks and so, so kind. “You’ve got me, okay? Whatever of me there is to have, you’ve got. We’re gonna get you through this.” He squeezes Steve’s hand lightly. “Toss me one of those pillows, would you?”

Steve takes a breath. Lets it out. Passes Iron Man a pillow.

“Lift,” Iron Man instructs. Steve raises his hips, and Iron Man slides the pillow beneath. “That, uh. Should be a better angle for you.”

He moves forward on his knees. “Just have to check you’re still…” Something clicks in Iron Man’s throat as he swallows. “Ready. If that’s okay?”

Two fingers hover over Steve’s hole. Steve nods and the fingers slip right in. The ease of it takes his breath away.

“Well,” Steve hears, through the soft roaring in his ears. “That, uh, seems to be in order, so…”

The fingers withdraw and the roaring fades.

“Just gotta,” Iron Man says, and there’s a squirting noise and a long, slippery sound. Iron Man gives a little choked off moan and Steve realizes he’s  _ slicking himself up _ and the static is back in his ears, only this time it’s the crackle of a bonfire—he can feel it burning, just beneath his skin…

Iron Man is moving closer. “Okay,” he says, and his voice is hoarse, and he’s shifting closer still. “Last chance to back out,” he says, like he’s joking, but also like he’s not.

In answer, Steve threads his arms beneath his knees and pulls them up and back, stretching himself open and bare.

“Ready when you are,” he says, summoning up the ghost of a smile. His throat is dry.

Breath hisses out through the modulator. It might be a laugh.

“Right,” Iron Man murmurs. “Well, then. Here goes.” He leans forward, until he’s pressing against Steve’s drawn-up legs. The metal of the chestplate is almost unspeakably cold against Steve’s blazing skin, but he barely notices, because suddenly there’s pressure, hot and blunt and insistent, against the entrance to his body, and it doesn’t feel like the fingers, it doesn’t feel like the fingers at all.  _ This,  _ Steve thinks,  _ is going inside me.  _ The thought doesn’t seem to fit.  _ Nothing  _ is fitting. His mind stutters and skips like a scratched record, and then  _ it’s Tony leaning over him, face flushed, sweat damping the dark hair on his forehead, and he’s looking down at Steve like he never wants to look at anything else again, like Steve is the only thing worth seeing. _

_ Now he’s speaking. _

“Just relax,”  _ he’s saying.  _ “Deep breaths, that’s it.”

Steve isn’t sure which of the three of them—Steve, Iron Man, or Tony himself—Tony is talking to, but he obeys just the same, breathes in deep, tries to relax, bears down against the pressure, and then there’s a gasp and a groan and another push and in a red-hot rush of sensation, Iron Man slides inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
> 
> ...
> 
> ┬─┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)
> 
> Anyway. That happened. Turned out a little angstier than expected but whatcha gonna do. THAT SAID, I just wrote a chapter about Iron Man roleplaying Tony Stark, BADLY (I still can't believe I did that), I have been looking forward for weeks to pulling this nonsense on you, and I would love to hear what you think. <3
> 
> Next time: some more shit happens i guess. probably there are orgasms. maybe cuddling. we'll see.


	11. who's your daddy?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to cptxrogers for cheerreading and wynnesome for betaing, both on very short notice! Y'all're rockstars. I did a bunch of rewriting before posting, so any errors are most certainly my own.

Steve hears someone curse, but the sound seems oddly removed from him. Everything seems removed from him, displaced to somewhere at the end of a long tunnel—everything, except for the blistering stretch of Iron Man inside him.

He already knew Iron Man was big—has weighed the heft of him in hand, has taken his girth into his mouth but this… This seems to operate on a different scale altogether. Iron Man is barely in him to the head and it’s already _so much._ He doesn’t know if it’s good. He doesn’t know how he feels about it at all—is struggling to parse anything beyond the simple fact of sensation. He only knows that Iron Man is in him and that Iron Man has stopped moving and that, at least, is wrong. Maybe even criminal and, well. He’s Captain America, isn’t he? He can’t stand for that. Experimentally, he pushes forward, sinking himself a few fractions deeper onto Iron Man’s cock. The slow skate of friction transmutes the pressure something he doesn’t have words for.

 _“Steve,”_ Iron Man gasps, like the name has been punched out of him.

The sound settles low in Steve’s pelvis, adding to the tension building there. He nudges his hips forward again and it feels… Not pleasurable, exactly, or at least not yet, but _right_ . The way the pull and burn of muscles during exercise feels right. The sort of rightness that comes upon him in the midst of battle, a clarity and purpose that guide him through each duck and leap and swing and blow, the sense that this is where he’s meant to be, this is what he’s _meant to be doing._ He tilts his hips this time so Iron Man’s cock hits him at an angle, and there they are, the first bright sparks of pleasure, and not much deeper to go to hit the place inside him that makes the world go molten—

“Steve, wait.”

Steve stops, mired in sudden uncertainty. Does Iron Man not like it? Does he not want this? Maybe Steve is doing it wrong, and so selfish of him even to ask it in the first place—

“Just… give yourself some time to adjust, okay? I know it can be a lot, your first time—”

Oh. Iron Man’s just fretting again.

Steve rolls his hips again, only this time he hooks a foot around Iron Man’s back and nudges him forward to meet Steve’s thrust. He and Iron Man gasp together as Iron Man slips a few more inches inside.

Steve swallows. That thrust sent Iron Man’s cock scraping across his prostate, and his brain seems to have gone dark and slow and sticky-sweet. It’s like trying to think through a head filled with blackstrap molasses.

“Maybe,” he says thickly, “maybe I like ‘a lot.’”

Iron Man gives an uneven laugh. “S-sure you do, tough guy.” His voice is strained. “But that’s no reason not to take it slow, at least to start. Easy does— _nngh._ ”

He breaks off on a strangled sound as Steve snaps his hips forward.

“Didn’t call you here,” he pants, “so you could give it to me _easy.”_

Iron Man groans. “God, you can’t— you can’t just _say_ things like that, Jesus—” When Steve rolls his hips this time, Iron Man meets him with an abortive thrust of his own.

Steve’s mind may be blurred and blotted with need, but he’s still a strategist. Iron Man’s not sure Steve wants this? Then Steve will just have to convince him.

Still, his moan as he rocks forward once again, as Iron Man counters with another half-thrust, is only a little exaggerated. “S’good,” he says. “I like it.”

“Yeah?”

Steve nods, runs his tongue along his teeth and arches his back. “I want more.”

He can almost taste Iron Man’s hesitation.

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Steve assures him. “You just. Have to. _Move,”_ and finally, _finally_ Iron Man is pulling back and pushing in again, slow but deliberate. It feels like licking a live wire, intimate, electric, consuming. Steve clenches instinctively and Iron Man’s breath catches.

“Oh, god, Steve. The way you feel—”

Iron Man is one to talk.

“More,” is all Steve says. His tongue feels heavy in his mouth. The slow, crackling friction as Iron Man moves inside him blunts his wits, sets his nerves buzzing with energy. He’s so close to what he’s been seeking, close and getting closer by the moment. The image pushes its way to the forefront of his consciousness, a dark-haired figure leaning in over him, the clench and shift of his muscles as he moves. He thinks of hips pistoning, hard and fast and relentless, Tony using him to take what he needs—what they _both_ need. He feels half-drunk on the very thought.

Iron Man thrusts in again, deeper than ever before, the head of his cock dragging across Steve’s prostate. Steve gives a hoarse little shout, bucking upwards as pleasure ignites like a firework within him.

“Good?”

“Great,” Steve manages. “J-just need—” He angles his hips, trying for something he can’t quite name.

“What do you need?” Iron Man rasps. He’s moving, but still too careful, too shallow and maddeningly slow. Steve tries to take him deeper but he can’t quite get the leverage. He lets out a growl of frustration.

“Help a guy out here, Winghead,” and god _dammit,_ Iron Man is actually slowing, pulling back, pulling away, and that’s not right, that’s not right at _all._ “Tell me what you—”

Steve wraps both legs around Iron Man’s armored torso and rolls the pair of them over, using his newfound leverage to sink the rest of the way onto Iron Man’s cock, and there it is, the fullness he craves, Iron Man so deep inside him he can practically taste it, and Iron Man—

Iron Man—

Iron Man isn’t saying anything, isn’t moving, doesn’t even seem to be breathing.

All Steve’s uncertainty comes flooding back.

“Is— Was that okay?” he asks, but he knows the answer. Of course it’s not okay; you can’t just go flinging people around in bed, especially not when you’re a supersoldier. He didn’t even think—this damn fever in his blood sapping his reason and judgement and now he’s— now he’s—

He starts to pull away but two hands clamp down on his hips, holding him in place. Iron Man draws in a huge lungful of air, like a swimmer surfacing from deep water.

_“Don’t.”_

The hands release their grip and begin to move, skimming his flanks, flitting over his chest and biceps.

“So okay,” Iron Man is saying, “more than okay, _Jesus_ ,” and his hands are still in motion, wandering, trembling and erratic, across Steve’s abs, his thighs, down the curve of his back, like Iron Man is desperate to touch Steve but can’t settle on how, like he’s trying to touch him everywhere at once. His words are coming faster now, earnest and clumsy. “Just take it, what you want, whatever you want.”

It’s the same thing Iron Man told him only a little while before, back when he was being Tony. _“That’s it, beautiful. Take what you need.”_ But this time, far from filling Steve with frustration, the words sweep over him in a wave of heat, lighting prickling fires beneath his skin. It’s not just the meaning behind the words, though that too has changed—permission, now, when before it felt only like denial. It’s the way Iron Man is saying it, like he’s desperate for it, like the very idea of Steve taking his pleasure in that way has him on the verge of coming apart.

Steve has never felt so wanted in his life.

For a moment, it’s more than he knows what to do with, the urgency and force of that desire. Then the fantasy in his head flips, and now it’s Tony who is _flat on his back, looking up at Steve like he’s staring into the face of God. “Whatever you want,” he’s saying, “I want to give it to you,” as Steve lifts himself up and then lets go, lets gravity impale him once more on the other man’s cock._

“Yes, _yes,_ Steve, god,” Iron Man groans as Steve grinds his hips onto Iron Man’s pelvis, feels Iron Man’s balls plump against his ass. “Just like—”

 _“_ — _like that, yeah, Jesus,” Tony says. “You’re incredible, you’re a marvel, you— you—” stuttering off into the quasi-silence of harsh groans and rapid breaths as Steve rises and falls, taking Tony into his body again, again, again._

Steve changes the angle a little, and now each thrust is butting up against his prostate and everything is heat and swiftly mounting friction.

“I feel—” he says, but he can’t think how to put it into words, the way his body feels like a match about to ignite, like any moment the scrape of their bodies together could send the pair of them up in smoke. _You make me want to burn,_ he could say, only that doesn’t sound quite right and anyway, he doesn’t know which of them he’d say it to, Tony or Iron Man—he barely knows which of them is in his mind and which is beneath him, because he can feel the coolness of metal against his bobbing cock as he leans in closer, but the words he’s hearing don’t seem to belong to Iron Man at all.

“Everything you ask for, anything you need, I want to give it to you, I want you to have it, have it, take it, god, _Steve—”_

“I’m close,” someone says, and for the life of him, Steve couldn’t say who.

“I can’t—” says someone else, or maybe it’s the same someone. “You’re so— _Christ.”_

“I need,” Steve pants, and he doesn’t know what he needs, but apparently Iron Man does, because something brushes across his stomach and then there’s a hand curling around his cock, slicking him with his own precome and it’s so _much,_ he feels overloaded with pleasure. He’s moving faster now, driving himself down harder as some bright elsewhere looms on the horizon, great and golden and burning, and he’s running towards it or maybe he’s running away but either way it’s getting closer, closer, close—

Orgasm takes him with a wordless cry, takes him over, a searing pleasure that tightens in his balls and spills through his cock, his release pulsing hot over Iron Man’s hand and Steve’s own chest. His rhythm falters; it’s all he can do to keep from collapsing, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because he can feel himself squeezing down around Iron Man’s cock and Iron Man is shouting and thrusting up and then he, too, is coming, warm and wet and perfect, buried deep inside.

Steve’s straining arms give way and he half sinks, half falls onto Iron Man’s chest. He makes the most of it though, brushing a clumsy kiss over where he thinks Iron Man’s mouth must be before his head drops all the way and he rolls to the side. He’s managed to brush the edge of Iron Man’s mouth-slot, at least. He knows Iron Man can’t have felt it, but he feels better for having done it just the same. It feels more honest that way.

Beside him and beneath him, Iron Man breathes out, shuddering and slow.

* * *

Steve lies on his back, feeling the ache deep inside him, the faint strain of exertion in the muscles of his stomach and thighs. They’ll fade soon—the serum makes sure of that—but he wants to savor them while he can.

“That was swell,” he says. He’s still a little dopey with the sex, but he can’t quite bring himself to care. “I liked that a lot.”

Iron Man gives a breathy chuckle. “Yeah, I gathered.” He reaches over and flicks a thumb over the corner of Steve’s smile. Steve tries to turn his face into the touch but Iron Man’s already pulling away and Steve’s a little too lazy to pursue him.

Laziness is a luxury not often afforded to him. He decides to savor that too.

“Did you?” he asks.

“Did I…?”

“Like it?”

“You couldn’t tell? I guess you were a little distracted at the time.”

Steve pulls a face and Iron Man chuckles again, reaching over to drag his nails lightly down Steve’s forearm, a caress with the merest suggestion of bite to it. Steve shivers.

Iron Man’s hand falls away.

“I liked it,” he says, almost reluctantly. “Liked seeing you…” He trails off. Exhales softly, a warm rush of white noise through the modulator. “I wish,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything else.

“Shellhead?” Steve ventures, after a moment.

“Winghead?” Iron Man parrots back. The mattress shifts as he pushes you up. “Anyway, not to be crude, but I think the evidence of just how much I liked it is gonna leak right out of you and ruin these sheets if we leave it much longer. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Steve makes a clumsy attempt to catch at Iron Man’s hand. The fact that he succeeds is, he suspects, as much due to Iron Man humoring him as to Steve’s own efforts. He brings Iron Man’s hand to his lips, rests the back of it on his cheek. A shiver goes through him. Iron Man’s _skin_. He thinks it may never stop being a fascination to him, to be holding the weight and human warmth of him, flesh and blood and bone. He sweeps his thumb down so it’s pressing against Iron Man’s wrist, feels his pulse stutter and jump as he brushes a kiss across Iron Man’s knuckles.

“I, uh—” Iron Man’s voice is cracked, raspy. “I am gonna need that back, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve grumbles, but he lets go all the same.

“I’ll. Um. Be back in a moment,” Iron Man says again. The bed creaks as he stands. Steve hears his footsteps pad across the floor.

He shifts a little on the mattress. There’s a profoundly unerotic squelch—he can’t help but be glad that Iron Man’s already left the room—and he feels something sticky sliding down the cleft of his ass. Iron Man is probably right about the sheets being ruined. The thought clenches briefly somewhere inside of him, a reflex born of growing up through the Depression years, when you had to scrimp and save and stretch everything you owned and still never had enough. But there are other sheets. Tony’s the one providing them, after all, and he’s sure Tony’s never lost a minute’s sleep over a ruined sheet in his life. He doesn’t think Tony would mind anyway. Tony wants to give him things, he likes it, he _said—_

Except that that wasn’t Tony. Of course it wasn’t. It was Iron Man who said that. It’s just that it sounded so much like something Tony would say. Tony’s the one who’s given him so much, after all. Did Iron Man do that on purpose? Or is it just coincidence and crossed wires again?

Iron Man comes back. Steve permits himself to be wiped down. The gentle friction of the washcloth sets something glowing inside him, a warmth that is nothing like the burning heat he felt before. He arches a little into Iron Man’s touch.

Iron Man finishes and makes to pull back, but Steve’s fingers close over his wrist, and this time, Steve doesn’t let go.

“Come on,” he says. “Take a load off. Stay a while.”

“I need to put the cloth back.”

“Just throw it.”

“Throw it?”

“Bathroom door’s still open, isn’t it?” Steve didn’t hear it close. “Just…” He mimes an overhand pitch with his spare hand.

“I’m not going to—”

“Then I’ll do it,” Steve says decisively and makes a grab for the cloth.

“What? Steve, no, it’s _filthy,”_ but Steve is already tugging the washcloth out of his hand. He balls it up, turns towards where he knows the bathroom to be, makes a quick estimation as to the distance and the height of the tub, and lobs the cloth into the air. The slap of wet cloth on porcelain and Iron Man’s indrawn breath tell him he’s hit his mark.

“You can’t even _see._ How—?”

“Serum,” Steve says simply. “Come on,” and he pulls on Iron Man’s arm until Iron Man climbs back into bed. Steve releases his wrist in favor of wrapping his entire arm around Iron Man’s waist. The metal is cool against his skin, but not unpleasantly so. He tugs, pulling Iron Man closer.

“Whoa,” Iron Man says. “What are you—? Oh. Aw, jeez. Should’ve known you’d be a snuggler. Wouldn’t a pillow or something be better?”

Steve shakes his head.

“The armor isn’t really the cuddliest…”

“Quiet, Avenger.”

Iron Man gives a snort, but obeys. He shifts a little and then there’s a hand resting on Steve’s side, thumb idly tracing the groove of his ribs. The pad of the finger is rough—callused. Steve wouldn’t have imagined that, before. He gives a hum of contentment.  

After a minute or so, he shifts a little, preparing to tangle one of his legs with Iron Man’s, but the movement makes his hip brush up against the wet spot. Ruined sheets, he thinks. That’s right. There’s something he meant to…

Ah, yes.

“Earlier,” he begins.

“What happened to ‘quiet’?”

Steve ignores this sally. “Were you being Tony?”

Iron Man goes very still.

Steve scowls at his own clumsiness. “That’s not what I meant. Just, at the end, when we were… The things you were saying, it sounded like you were being— like you were pretending, again _,_ ” he corrects himself. “Like before.”

“Right,” Iron Man says, though there’s a bit of a lag to it. “Yeah, I guess I— Yeah. Sorry. I know it’s not what you wanted.”

“Oh, I didn’t mind,” Steve assures him, stifling the yawn currently threatening to balloon its way out of his throat. “I liked it, actually. It was good. You really sounded like him that time.”

“…ah. Um. Okay, yeah. That’s… good. That it was good?”

“I liked it,” Steve says again, because Iron Man sounds like he could use the reassurance. “Like it when you’re you, too. But it was… I think it helped, at least a little.” A memory pops into his head: Tony in the kitchen, eyes blue-rimmed with fatigue but still smiling, still so willing to give Steve his time, to help him makes sense of things. “Tony was telling me a few weeks ago, actually. About what it’s called, when something isn’t real but still works, even if you know about it. It’s like that, I think. You and Tony. The placebo effect.”

There’s a brief, strangely taut silence. Then Iron Man begins to laugh. He pulls out of Steve’s grasp, curling in on himself as the laughter goes on, far longer than seems at all warranted, a painful, wheezing chuckle that heaves in his lungs and catches in his throat.

“Shellhead? You all right?”

“F-fine.”

“You, uh. Care to share the joke?”

“No, it’s, ah. Not really that funny, just.” Iron Man sucks in a gasp of air. _“Christ.”_

Steve’s frown deepens. “I didn’t mean to offend,” he begins.

“I know,” Iron Man says, as the last few hiccups of laughter subside. He takes Steve’s arm where it’s fallen between them and presses it to his chest for a moment, before lowering it once more to the mattress. “I should go. It’s getting late.”

Steve notices for the first time how cool the night air is without another body to warm him. “You don’t have to.”

“No,” Iron Man says, “I know. But I should. Got my own digs to be getting back to.”

Steve wrestles down his disappointment. “Sure,” he says. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks for… Well. All of it, really.”

Iron Man lets out a short laugh, softer than his previous one. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” Steve reminds him irritably. “I’m wearing a blindfold.”

“Pedant,” Iron Man accuses, a note of fondness creeping into his voice. He sighs. “What do you want? Should I stay or should I go?” When Steve doesn’t answer straight away, he starts to sing. Steve rather suspects that Iron Man wouldn’t have much of a voice even without the distortion of the vocal modulator, but with it, the sound issuing from Iron Man’s mouth can barely be called music at all. _“Darling, you’ve got to let me know.”_

“Cut that out,” Steve orders. “What a godawful racket.”

“ _Should I stay or should I—_ Oof!”

This as a pillow smacks into what Steve is almost positive is Iron Man’s chest.

“Give me that,” Iron Man says, wrestling the pillow away from Steve. Laughing, Steve lets him.

“Everything I heard about you as a kid was a lie,” Iron Man informs him. “You’re a menace to society. You oughta be clapped up in jail.”

“Mmm,” Steve agrees, making another grab for the pillow. He tucks it under his head, and smiles in Iron Man’s direction. The smile slips slowly from his face. “You going, then?”

“Do you want me to?”

“If you think you should.”

“Do you want me to?” Iron Man says again.

“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t…”

“Steve.” Iron Man’s voice is stern.

Steve falls silent.

“Do you,” Iron Man asks, enunciation careful, but not harsh, “want me to?”

Slowly, Steve shakes his head.

Iron Man sighs again. “Then I’ll stay,” he says, adding, as the mattress depresses under his weight once more, “But I want to be the big spoon.”

* * *

He dreams of Tony, the warmth of his breath as he presses a kiss to the back of Steve’s neck. He knows it’s Tony he dreams of because he can feel, quite distinctly, the bristling scrape of a mustache against his skin. He thinks he dreams of other things, too, but those he can’t quite remember.

Steve wakes hours later to morning wood and the realization—if the complete lack of urgency accompanying his erection is anything to go by—that his cycle is finally winding down. He rolls his shoulders back in a stretch, and palms himself contentedly. He always has a day or two like this at the end of a cycle, after the worst of the fervor has passed but before his libido abandons him completely—a day or two where he can want the way he imagines most people want, at his leisure, without need gnawing at his bones. He doesn’t think Iron Man will mind if Steve takes care of himself now. Maybe Iron Man will even want to lend him a hand. Maybe—he smiles at the thought—Steve can return the favor.

He stifles a yawn and blinks into the unexpected glow of morning light. A second realization clenches in his chest—he’s no longer wearing his blindfold. It must’ve come off some time during the night.

He clamps his eyes shut as his heartbeat stutters and speeds to a fluttering arrhythmia, spurred on by a sick and guilty excitement. He feels like he's suddenly found himself in uncharted waters. Without the blindfold, anything could happen. He could’ve seen Iron Man’s face. He could still see it. All he has to do is open his eyes.

He won’t, of course. It would be the worst kind of betrayal of trust, and after everything Iron Man has done for him! But the possibility is there, hanging in the air.

To see Iron Man’s face…

Except that he can’t help but notice, as the seconds drag on, just how quiet it is. No shifting sheets, no sounds of another person's breathing. No faucets running or movement from the bathroom. No footsteps.

“Shellhead?” he says, tentatively.

The room returns only silence.

He opens his eyes.

He's not exactly surprised by what he sees, but the sight sets something cold leaking out of him nevertheless, like air from a punctured tire. The far side of the bed has been remade, covers and sheets tugged haphazardly into place. There’s a folded piece of paper sitting on one pillow, but apart from that, the bed is empty.

Iron Man has gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wanted to get this one out for my birthday, in hopes that any comments and kudos might distract me from the chill hand of the reaper. Hope you all enjoyed the boinking and the cuddling and general softness. Next time, we have… not that. Whoooooo’s excited for actions to have consequences??? *jazz hands*
> 
> Next chapter might be a little longer coming out because I have a few other WIPs I need to finish first, but if you haven’t heard from me by the new year, feel free to come and poke me gently on tumblr or whatever.


	12. is he rich...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brain telling me to post or die so I chose post; thanks so much to nigmuff and SilverInStars for early cheer-reading/encouragement, and extra special thanks to the ever-wonderful wynnesome, without whom this story, and my life, would be considerably worse.

For a minute Steve struggles with himself, fighting down the awareness of absence, the icy spill of it across his innards.

_(Gone: the ugliest word in his vocabulary, echoing loss and winter seas…)_

He presses the heels of his hands to his temples. Iron Man probably just had some kind of errand to run, or— or an appointment to keep, maybe. There are a thousand possible explanations, none of which merit this sudden swell of desolation _(lapping at the corners of his mind, its salt-water sting—)_. It doesn’t _mean_ anything. Why, just a few hours ago Iron Man was here and he was laughing. He was holding Steve and he was laughing.

Could something have changed? Was it something Steve did? Something he said or didn’t say?

He clamps down on the thought. There’s nothing to be gained from that sort of speculation. Especially with—and really what could be more ridiculous than sitting here fretting over _what if_ s and _maybe_ s with Iron Man’s letter lying unread not two feet away?

He takes a steadying breath, then lowers his hands from his temples and reaches for the note.

The message inside is brief:

_Sorry for the French exit—suit needs recharging. Anything you need, call me._

The last two words are underlined twice.

Steve refolds the note. Settles himself back against the pillows. Breathes out.

He knew it had to be something like that. Something innocuous. Something that was nothing at all. It was just that, for a moment there, he thought…

He’s not sure what, exactly, only that Iron Man’s absence seemed suddenly and sickeningly inevitable. The twist in a story he’d failed to notice unfolding. The blow he should’ve seen coming.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t a blow. The armor just needed recharging. A small, simple thing, eminently reasonable. It wasn’t that Iron Man _wanted_ to leave. He just had errands to run. Steve can understand that.

He shifts against his pillows, his confidence settling and remassing like sediment at the bottom of a stirred glass. He tries on a smile, and finds that it fits quite comfortably on his face. Only errands after all.

Setting the note aside, Steve tucks an arm behind his head and leans back, arching his body in a stretch. The brush of cotton over sensitized flesh reminds him that he’s still half hard. He feels coiled and loose both at once, a lazy, rolling tension. He was meaning to do something about that, wasn’t he? He was meaning to have some help.

Iron Man’s absence admittedly puts a spoke in those pleasant—he stretches again, curling his toes, mmm, _very_ pleasant—plans, but as problems go, it’s not exactly insurmountable.

After all, how long can charging the armor actually take? How long ago did Iron Man leave? Surely he’ll have finished by now, or at least be close to finishing. And he did say to call, if Steve needed anything. And okay—Steve smooths the sheets across his thighs, eyeing the bulge of his cock—so maybe it’s not actually a _need_ , at least not anymore, but he doesn’t think Iron Man’s likely to split hairs in this particular situation. He knows Iron Man enjoyed himself last night, in spite of his scruples, and now that Steve is fresh and clear-headed and more than eager, well. What objections could there be?

He digs a thumb into the crease of his thigh, briefly allowing himself to imagine other hands gripping him there, squeezing tight. It’ll be good, being with Iron Man like this, now that he’s himself again. Good, yeah—parting his ankles ever so slightly so his balls settle more comfortably between his thighs—to come together as equals, partners in their mutual pursuit of pleasure. Good to be able to do for Iron Man some small part of what Iron Man has done for him. He thinks Iron Man will like that; in fact, he’s damn well going to make sure of it.

Mind already buzzing with such amiable schemes, Steve reaches for his cell phone.

Iron Man picks up on the second ring.

“Steve? Everything all right?” His voice is sharp—urgent. “I can be there in ten—no, make that seven—”

“Hey, easy there, fella.” Steve’s laughing, just a little. He can’t help it. It warms him, hearing how much Iron Man cares, how important Steve’s well-being is to him. How did Steve ever doubt him? How could he ever have imagined, even for a moment, that Iron Man would just… just _leave_ him? “There’s no fire.” Then, remembering a phrase he once heard Wasp use: “Cool your jets.”

Iron Man lets out a sound of startled amusement. “Where on earth did you hear— Yeah. Yeah, okay, jets cooled.” He breathes out in a noisy, pressurized _whoosh_ , like air let out of a steam valve. “So, uh. What _can_ I do for you?”

There’s an awkwardness to the question, tension still clinging round the edges of his voice. Steve finds he wants to _fix_ that. To unspool him a little, bring him down as loose and easy as Steve feels.

He shifts down the bed, toeing at the sheets, tugging them down his torso and hips until he’s just barely on the right side of decency, his erection still covered but tenting the fabric enough to expose his flesh to the cool morning air. His balls tighten at the shift in temperature, goosebumps pricking at the tops of his thighs.

“Well,” he begins, fighting to keep the breathiness out of his voice, “first of all, let me say that I had the honor of serving in France alongside many members of the Resistance—”

“...okay?”

“—brave, patriotic men and women,” Steve continues, trailing his fingers lightly back and forth across his pecs, “unfailingly courteous as hosts—”

Iron Man makes a small sound of realization. He’s always been quick on the update. “Oh, honestly, Winghead. Is this because I said, in the note…?” The tension has left his voice now, replaced by amused exasperation. “It’s just an _expression—”_

“—and even more gracious as guests—”

“You’re messing with me, aren’t you? This is you, messing with me.”

“—and in light of the long and storied partnership between our two nations—”

“Do you prefer ‘Irish good-bye’?”

Steve hopes his silence is stern enough to convey his disapproval. He figures he probably manages decently well, all things considered. After all, it’s not like Iron Man can see the smile tugging at the corners of his lips, although he might just be able to catch the hitch in Steve’s breathing as he lets his fingers wander down to his abs…

“Well,” Iron Man says tartly, “I’ll be sure to consult a thesaurus next time. Glad you’re feeling chipper enough to lecture me, though.” There’s a slight uptick in his voice, the barest hint of a question.

And here they are.

A tingle darts down Steve’s spine, radiating out across his shoulders, into his belly, down to his toes—nerves, shot through with no small amount of anticipation.

“Actually…” He clears his throat. “That’s the other reason I called. I wanted to let you know that things seem to have, uh. Run their course. With my. You know.”

He waits.

Silence from the other end of the line. It stretches between them, echoing and empty and ever more glaringly _not._ A vacancy; a neon-lighted nothing where something ought to be.

“Well,” Iron Man says at last. “It’s about time.”

Steve’s stomach clenches. There’s a forceful quality to the words, and he isn’t quite sure how to take them, on the back of that strange, charged silence. Is Iron Man relieved on Steve’s behalf, or his own?

He feels the touch of something cold, an echo of that earlier desolation. Surely there’s no way— He can’t have been reading things that wrong this whole time, thinking Iron Man didn’t mind, thinking maybe he even wanted it, being there with Steve—that was real, wasn’t it? He’d scarcely even thought to doubt—

But what if—

“I mean,” Iron Man continues, “you’ve been champing at the bit to get back into the field, haven’t you?”

The cold shrinks away, dark waters retreating. Now, that, see— _that’s_ a bit more like it. It sounds like, even if Iron Man _was_ counting down the hours, he was doing it for Steve’s sake. Steve can work with that.

It was real, after all.

“I don’t think there’s really any sort of a formal reinstatement process,” Iron Man is saying. “We just have to call up the others, let them know you’re good to go. Or. Not we, obviously; you’re more than capable of handling a few phone calls—”

Steve smiles. “Gee, I hope so. I’d hate to disappoint your faith in me.”

“So that’s. Really great,” Iron Man concludes. “I mean. You must be so relieved.”

Steve makes a non-committal sound. “It’ll be good to, uh. Get back to it,” he says vaguely. “But actually”—a warm flush is creeping through his body, up into his cheeks, across his shoulders, down through his chest, down and further down—“there’s something else I had in mind first.” He scratches his nails lightly across his abs, barely an inch above where the head of his cock rests against his skin, and feels it twitch and swell against his stomach.

“…yeah?” There’s a note of wariness in Iron Man’s voice. Steve decides he likes it. Let Iron Man be wary. This is Steve’s show now.

“I don’t know if I ever explained,” he says, noting with detached pleasure the huskiness of his own voice, “what things are like, at the end of a cycle. It’s not just on or off, you know.”

“I, ah. Uh. Didn’t know that, no.” Iron Man sounds a little flustered now, and lord but that’s a heady feeling. To be the one making Iron Man squirm.

“Mmm.” Steve flattens his palm against his stomach, rolls his hips a little. Pushes his palm down to smooth over his upper thigh. “I looked for you this morning.” Significance hangs off every word. “But you weren’t there.”

Iron Man’s breathing has gone distinctly uneven. “Yeah, s-sorry. The armor—”

“No, I understand. Like I said, there’s no fire. I’m happy to wait.” He pauses to let the significance of the words sink in.

“You, uh.” Iron Man’s voice is hoarse, audibly so, even through the modulator—hoarse and a little dazed. “You need me to…?”

“I don’t know if it’s a question of need, exactly,” Steve admits scrupulously. “Not _need_ like it was before. But…” He pauses. Draws in a breath. Licks his lips. Savors the idea of Iron Man on the other end of the line, his current task forgotten, hanging on Steve’s words. “I’d sure like the chance to show you how grateful I am for everything you’ve done for me.”

A ringing silence.

Then:

“Grateful,” Iron Man echoes, and Steve realizes something is wrong.

“I—”

Iron Man’s voice is shaking. “Don’t— You don’t—” He spits the words out like he’s just bitten into something rotten. “Don’t you think, don’t you _dare_ think, for one minute— You don’t owe me a _thing,_ you hear? Not a single, solitary goddamn thing,” and Steve doesn’t understand where it’s all coming from, the anger in his voice, the curdling disgust—

He’s pushed himself upright on the bed, hunching over the phone like it’s something he can contain. He can feel the conversation spinning out of control, and he wants to stop it, to wrench it back, but how can he when he doesn’t even understand what’s going wrong? “That’s not what I meant—”

“Wasn’t it?”

“No!” Steve snaps, “I— Jeez, Shellhead, what exactly do you think this is?”

“Payment for services rendered?”

It’s easy to forget just how powerful words can be—how, deployed correctly, they can rewrite history itself. Take something intimate and urgent and full of care and turn it ugly, turn it sordid and shallow and small. Iron Man’s words don’t feel like a blow. They feel like something stolen from him. Something precious wrenched right out of his hands. And he wants to be angry about that—can feel the anger kindling in him, bright and searing, except— What has Iron Man actually stolen? A memory? A sense of closeness? You might just as easily say Iron Man has taken himself away, and isn’t that Steve’s own fault, for assuming in the first place that Iron Man was his to hold?

The tide is coming in, numbing his limbs, making him sluggish and dull. Taking him to itself. “I don’t understand,” is all he can think of to say. He swipes a hand across his mouth and finds that he’s shaking his head, a steady wobble of incomprehension. “I don’t _understand_.” Then, with a burst of energy: “Why would you say that? Why would you even think it?”

“I—” Iron Man begins, and stops, as if the question has thrown him.

“I don’t know what this was to you,” Steve continues, gathering together the ashes of his anger, fanning them back into flame—anger is good, anger is _heat,_ “but I would’ve thought you’d know me better than to think—”

He cuts himself off, not entirely sure what he’s accusing Iron Man of thinking, only fiercely, entirely certain that Iron Man _should’ve_ known him better. Or, just maybe, that he should’ve known Iron Man better. A signal failure; a break-down along the lines of intimacy.  

“Winghead…” Iron Man sounds pained. But he doesn’t say anything else. Only Steve’s nickname, as if that, too, that little shared joke, that expression of fondness between them is an open-ended question.

“Tell me that’s not how you see it,” Steve commands, hating the way it comes out more like a plea. “As ‘services rendered.’”

Like it was nothing more than a transaction. Like they were strangers to each other. Strangers, or less than—a stranger, at least, might have been moved by kindness. Compassion sitting in for affection, for genuine care.

He remembers the urgency in Iron Man’s voice earlier, when he thought Steve needed him—remembers the almost palpable concern, and is struck again by a bewildering sense of discord. It just doesn’t add up, any of it.

“I—” Iron Man stammers. “I—” And then, soft enough it sounds like defeat, “No. No, of course it isn’t.”

Steve waits for the relief to hit him, the vindication, but all he feels is more confusion. “Then why’d you _say_ it?”

“I don’t— I— I’ve just got a lot on my mind, I guess—not that that’s an excuse—and I know how— how _honorable_ you are—”

Steve rakes a hand through his hair and pulls, hard, balanced on a knife’s edge of incredulity and frustration. “Yeah, because pimping myself out to you would definitely be the honorable thing to do—”

“—and the last thing,” Iron Man continues wretchedly, “the last thing I want in the world is for you to feel obligated—”

“It’s not about _obligation.”_ How does Iron Man not get that? “I just wanted—” He realizes he’s cut Iron Man off again, and stops.

“You wanted?” Iron Man prompts after a moment.

There’s something in the way he says it, gentle but urging, like it matters…

 _I just wanted to_ , Steve thinks, and then, surprising himself a little, _wanted you. _

“I just thought it would be nice,” he says, amending with a wince at the bloodlessness of ‘nice,’ “fun. Making time together, without all the… complications. You know. Figured we could show each other a good time. Just you and me.”

“Just you and me,” Iron Man echoes. “Yeah. That does sound nice. Fun.” Beneath the gentle teasing lies a wistfulness so profound that Steve knows what he’s going to say before he says it.

“But you can’t.”

“I wish I could. I really do, but… Mr Stark’s coming back soon and there are some things I really need to see to and if things aren’t, you know. Urgent, anymore…”

It’s a reasonable enough explanation. Steve might even have believed it, if it wasn’t for everything that came before.

It’s on the tip of his tongue to call Iron Man on the lie, except… What would that actually get him? More lies? More searoom in the widening gulf between them?

And, when it comes down to it, he’s promised not to pry into personal matters—all the Avengers have—and whatever this is is starting to feel awfully personal.

He rubs a hand over his face, dragging it around behind to clutch the back of his neck. “I see,” he says, voice as neutral as he can make it. Really—glancing down to where his dick hangs limply between his thighs—it’s probably for the best.

“I would if I could,” Iron Man says again, and for a moment the wistfulness in his voice sharpens into something almost like yearning. It vanishes, gone as if it had never been, as he continues. “You go ahead and have your fun without me, okay? Pull out all the stops; really give me something to regret, and serve me right, for leaving you in the lurch.”

Despite himself, Steve smiles. “Feeling jealous?”

“How could I not be?” Iron Man returns lightly. “Here I’ll be, nose back to the grindstone, and there you’ll be…”

“Thinking of you,” Steve suggests. “That’ll give you something to be jealous of.”

There’s a fractional pause, just long enough to wonder if Steve has—somehow, _again_ —gone too far.

Iron Man huffs out a laugh.

“Jealous of myself, huh? Now there’s a concept.”

Steve bites his tongue, then hurries on before he can think better of it. “Listen, Shellhead, before you go— We’re… okay, right? You and me?”

Another half beat—and is Steve wrong in reading hesitation there?—before Iron Man replies. “Of course.”

It’s not exactly enough to reassure him, but Steve doesn’t push. “Good. Because I’d hate it if any of this… You’re important to me, and— and I—” _don’t know where I’d be without you. Don’t know what I’d do._ Impossible to speak the thought aloud, to lay all that weight on Iron Man’s shoulders. Iron Man, his first friend in the modern era. Iron Man, who has already borne so much.

“Right back atcha, big guy,” and Steve is sure at least he isn’t imagining the softness in Iron Man’s voice.

“You’re bigger than me,” Steve reminds him. “Technically.”

“Only in the armor,” Iron Man shoots back. “Technically.”

Steve allows himself to absorb this piece of interesting information. Iron Man didn’t seem smaller than him when they were together, but then, would he really have been able to tell?

He feels a faint stirring of interest in his nether regions, and files the thought away for later examination.

“Anyway,” Iron Man is saying, “I’d better leave you to it. Got enough of my own to be getting on with, lucky boy that I am.”

“An Iron Man’s work is never done?”

“Something like that.”

“See you soon?” It comes out a little quicker than Steve intended, eager and questioning, but Iron Man only replies generically:

“See you.”

The call ends.

Steve pushes himself up and swings around to sit on the edge of the bed. Across the room, mid-morning sunlight streams through French windows, warm and golden, like someone’s idea of a joke. He stares down at the phone in his lap, the phone blinking the length of the call back up at him. Seven minutes and forty-three seconds. The numbers look wrong, out of place, as if time is a faulty metric. As if whatever just happened can only be understood according to some other scale entirely. Turbulence, maybe. Seismic magnitude.

He tosses the phone onto the bed and rakes both hands through his hair, steepling his fingers behind his neck, leaning back into their hold.

What _did_ happen? Even now he scarcely understands. He and Iron Man were having a perfectly pleasant conversation, when Iron Man suddenly lashed out, because… because he thought Steve felt obligated to sleep with him? As if Steve would ever— For god’s sake, all he did was say he was grateful. Does Iron Man really not understand the difference between gratitude and— and _that?_

He _has_ been acting a little strangely recently, with his intermittent melancholy, his vacillation between reluctance and enthusiasm. But then, it’s been a strange few days. A strange situation.

This, though. The violence of his reaction. It feels like something on a different level entirely, or—

Or maybe it’s _not—_ maybe it’s been like this the whole time and Steve’s only just now started to notice?

He groans aloud and drops his hands into his lap.

When did talking to Iron Man get so _complicated?_

He just doesn’t have the context, that’s the thing. There’s no way he can make it all fit—everything that just happened within the bounds of everything he knows about Iron Man. He can’t make it fit, and so the explanation must lie in one of the things he _doesn’t_ know. And there’s—god, there’s _so much_ he doesn’t know. How did he never realize before how much?

The morning air is cool against his back. His shoulders tighten. He’s aware of a vague sense of unfamiliarity about the room, a spectral, amorphous presence. Or, no—not a presence. It’s the feeling when the light has shifted; everything is different and yet nothing has changed.

He rubs at his upper arm, trying to flatten the goosebumps that have appeared there. He supposes he’s just never really felt it before, not like this: the mystery of Iron Man, its breadth and its magnitude.

Oh, he knew there was information about his friend he didn’t have—things that, sure, a lot of people might find important, like a face or a name or a history. But he’s not ‘a lot of people.’ He had a secret identity himself back during the war; he can understand the need for a little personal compartmentalization. He knows Iron Man is brave and clever and thoughtful and funny and kind. That Iron Man is someone he can trust, on or off the field, someone who will always have his back, someone who _cares._ The rest just… never seemed relevant.

Now, with Iron Man’s secrets seeming to buzz and thicken in the air, it’s starting to feel pretty darn relevant.

Steve sighs. Not that it makes the slightest bit of difference. Iron Man’s clearly not interested in explaining… anything, really, and Steve will just have to live with that. Pledged not to pry, and all. He’s made it this far without knowing any details of Iron Man’s private life. There’s no reason that has to change.

As for any remaining tension between them, well. He cares about Iron Man and values his friendship, and he knows—and whatever doubts he may have entertained before, the certainty of this thought shines like a beacon—he _knows_ Iron Man cares about him. And that will be enough.

It’ll have to be.

He drums his fingers against his knee, feeling dissatisfied on some base, mechanical level. Not hungry. Thirsty, maybe. He reaches for the glass of water on his nightstand, fingers brushing against a ragged edge of paper.

A shock of recognition goes through him. Iron Man’s note. He… never really got a chance to look at it, did he? Too eager for answers to properly examine their vehicle. Well. No harm in taking a look now, is there?

He picks up the note, handling it with care, like it’s evidence in some kind of case. Like it’s something to be solved.

The paper is thick and unlined—apparently torn from the pages of one of Steve’s sketchbooks, just as the pen must have been borrowed from his desk. He wonders—smoothing out the creases on the page—where Iron Man learned to use a fountain pen. Maybe it was something he had to pick up, in the course of his work for Tony Stark?

Steve’s eyes flick down to the bottom of the note. Iron Man has scribbled something there—presumably his initials. But from the careless way he’s written his letters, the M a collection of loose bisecting strokes practically on top of the I, it could almost as easily be a row of Xs. That’s a shorthand Steve remembers from his own day—kisses enclosed for a sweetheart, far across the sea.

The thought shivers down his spine. He sets the letter aside.

He should really get up soon. Any minute now. Actually get up—get up and start his day. He’ll feel better for it—he’s always felt at his best when in action. He’ll change the sheets, that’s a good start. Take a shower.

Iron Man will have showered already. Probably as soon as he left Steve’s room. Or—

Does Iron Man shower? Surely he’d have to take off the armor for that but—does it even come off? All of it?

Iron Man did say, when he first agreed to—to _help_ Steve, that he’d have to leave some of it on. Steve understands why he might’ve wanted to keep the helmet—too easy to identify a face through contours alone, even without the benefit of sight, and there was the question, too, of Iron Man’s voice. But Iron Man took the helmet off in the end, if only for a little while, and that—Steve licks his lips, remembering—that was a hell of a thing.

But the chest plate—that he kept on even to sleep. Because… he can’t take it off? Surely not. Surely Iron Man would have said…

Or, no, probably he wouldn’t have. But Iron Man certainly doesn’t smell like someone who hasn’t washed his chest in months. Anyway, no one could wear something like that all the time, large and inflexible as it is—no matter how well-fitted, it would chafe beyond bearing—

Steve has a brief image of ruddy, irritated skin, striping down muscular shoulders, carving across a sharp-cut collarbone, girdling the waist below. Imagines fitting his lips to the weals, soothing the galled flesh with his tongue—the way Iron Man would gasp. Would moan. No one would have done that for him before…

He shifts on the bed, parting his thighs, half reclining back against the pillows.

No, far more likely that Iron Man kept it on for Steve’s benefit—that there’s something there he wanted to hide. Some kind of scarring, maybe. Something distinctive. Identifying. He finds, strangely, that he likes the thought. Not, of course, that he wants his friend to be scarred—of course he doesn’t—but just. The idea of it. Iron Man’s life printed on his skin in a way Steve’s can never be, not since the serum. The idea of Iron Man being—being _legible_ like that, bare—skin and secrets all—to Steve’s eye.

He pictures it now, Iron Man’s naked torso, his muscles firm but the flesh overtop tender and untouched, pale as a kept secret. Flecked with pearly scars. A constellation. A history.

 _I want to know you,_ he thinks.

He realizes, vaguely to his surprise, that he’s most of the way back on the bed now, lying against the pillows, sprawling and easy, one hand loosely encircling his half-hard cock.

Well. Really, it’s no more than what he _told_ Iron Man he was going to do, is it?

He grips himself more firmly and shuts his eyes, letting the thought grow until it fills his mind. No need to settle on some kind of scenario this time—no need for narratives or elaborate contrivances. Just Iron Man, here in Steve’s bedroom once again, and this time no blindfolds or armor between them.

Start with the boots, _releasing their catches, letting Iron Man step forwards—step towards him, barefoot onto the floor._ Iron Man is shorter than Steve—he said—but then, he’d still have the helmet on, wouldn’t he? So maybe, just for that moment he and Steve would be exactly the same height. _Eye to eye, perfectly level, Steve holding Iron Man’s gaze through the mask as he reached forward to take one gauntleted hand in his._

Iron Man’s hands. So often felt, these past few days, but never seen. Steve imagines _sliding them free of their shell, turning them back and forth, holding them up to the light._ Imagines _the way Iron Man’s eyes would close, the way his breathing would stutter and grow harsh as Steve lifted his hands to his lips._

Steve has raised his own hand in unconscious sympathy; now he shudders, feeling his own breath across his knuckles, the promise contained within dampness and heat, while in his mind…

_…he’d be moving on to the shoulders, to the tops of Iron Man’s thighs, pulling down the hose an inch at a time, sleek metal giving way to bone and rounded muscle until all that was left were four pools of gold at Iron Man’s wrists and ankles. Four pools of gold and acres of taut, toned flesh, jumping and pebbling under Steve’s unaccustomed touch._

The helmet next. Resolutely, Steve avoids imagining any of the details of Iron Man’s face. Don’t think about his chin—pointed or broad? About his cheeks—full? gaunt? somewhere between? About his brows, about his lips—

Except maybe…

Iron Man _must’ve_ broken his nose at least once, scrapper that he is. Give him a fighter’s nose then, a little flattened but still proud, and the eyes… Well. No reason not to picture those, the way Steve’s seen them so many times, brilliant and blue and _locked onto his face. Wide, too, because Iron Man would be afraid, wouldn’t he, to have his protections stripped away, the truth of him laid bare. He’d be afraid, but he’d want it, too, because it was Steve, because he wanted Steve to have that of him._

 _Because_ —the thought catches behind his ribs like an angler’s hook, tugging sharply— _because he trusted Steve, the way Steve has trusted him._

Steve grits his teeth against the sudden swell of emotion. Rides out the wave until it settles back into a more manageable arousal.

Take a step backwards. What next?

The groin plate, yes, that would be it. _Pausing to greet Iron Man’s cock like an old friend—a friendly nuzzle, a kiss in greeting as Iron Man groaned aloud above him, arched his back and raked his fingers through Steve’s hair. Reaching around behind to grab two great handfuls of Iron Man’s ass, kneading and massaging the muscle, just because he could. Just because it was his to touch and grasp. His, because Iron Man wanted it so._

 _And finally, the chest plate, like unclasping the book of him—the most jealously guarded secret of Iron Man’s body and now all Steve’s, all Steve’s— Iron Man’s hands guiding his to the armor’s hidden catches—not just letting him._ Helping _him—_

He lets his hands roam over his own chest and imagines it’s Iron Man’s he’s touching. Imagines the way Iron Man would gasp and quiver and moan. At being touched. At being _seen._

He thinks the words again—speaks them aloud this time, if only in his fantasy. _“I want to know you,” murmured into Iron Man’s deltoid as Steve scored his teeth lightly across his shoulder—sucked a hickey, livid and purple into the meat of Iron Man’s chest. Between the scars and signposts of Iron Man’s past, leaving marks of his own._

He imagines _a hand coming down and pressing against the back of his head, a wordless plea for more. The look on Iron Man’s face—_

Except he can’t imagine that, can he, because that would mean imagining Iron Man’s face, and he doesn’t want that—to dream up some kind of phantom to fill the gaps. Because maybe—just maybe one day Iron Man will take off his helmet, and Steve doesn’t want to look at him in that moment and see only the _wrong colored hair,_ or the _wrong angle to the jaw._ He wants it left pristine, untouched, that moment of recognition— _oh,_ Steve smiling and reaching for him _, there you are,_ and there indeed he’ll be—there just like he’s always been, all this time, just out of sight.

He can’t imagine that, so instead he grips himself tighter and imagines _flipping Iron Man around, bending him over the bed—_ this bed, the very one Steve’s lying in now, _god,_ and Iron Man _more than willing—and revealing the uncharted territory of his back. Mapping him with eyes, lips, hands, with teeth and tongue. From the broad steppes of his shoulders to the dimpled lowlands of his lower back, down the ridge of his spine to the swelling hills of his buttocks and the dark valley between._

_“I want to learn you,” he’d say, dipping slick fingers into the cleft of Iron Man’s ass as Iron Man shuddered and groaned and arched up into his touch…_

Even after he’s come, drooling spunk all over his hand as he pictures _taking Iron Man from behind, both of them naked, both of them braced in front of Steve’s full-length mirror, both of them watching as Steve takes Iron Man apart,_ even after he’s changed the sheets, after he’s showered and dressed, even then the words linger, burned into Steve’s mind like the afterimage of the sun, the hazy and indelible residue of light.

He stands at the side of the bed, staring down at Iron Man’s note one last time, brushing his thumb over the signature that is and is not a kiss.

_I want to know you._

Slowly, he refolds the note, tucking it safely away in his nightstand drawer before he turns around and walks out the door to start his day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next time: "oh, well, now that Steve's onto Iron Man it's only a matter of time before he puts two and two together probably I should imagine; revelations shall abound, tears and laughter and full-frontal snogging and... wait. Chapters: 12/20? what do you mEaN we're barely halfway through the story??? silks? SIILLLKSS????" (<\--you the reader)
> 
> (yeah i had to change the projected length sorry not sorry but also kinda sorry. honestly if this happens again i'm going to start running out of chapter titles. but at least next chapter featuring the long-awaited return of Tony Stark? sure been a while since we've seen him, huh? wonder what he's been up to? probably something relaxing. i bet he's doing great 😎)
> 
> As always, your comments are my lifesblood.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and chapter titles from "[Time of the Season](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpPy9hJYA8)," by the Zombies.
> 
> Find me on tumblr [here](http://whenas-in-silks.tumblr.com/post/178250232770/fic-the-time-of-the-season-aka-mating-cycle) or at my designated Marvel blog [here](http://sister-stark.tumblr.com/)!


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